After reading the NSA article about getting ISIS in very subtle ways that makes it seem like technical glitches, does anyone believe that there were actual “technical glitches” preventing this guy from testifying on video about his CIA torture?
yes, I believe there's a team funded using millions of US taxpayer money working on sabotaging Assanges defense in every possible way including illegal and immoral ways like hacking, bribing, black mailing, etc..
You can bet on it. Also, these people will be highly motivated and not just be "doing their job".
They'll be made well aware that their "way of life" and "reality as they know it" literally depends on the success of their work. Considering how these people are part of a criminal enterprise, it can be argued it's actually a true self-fulfilling prophesy.
As far as I'm concerned, people involved in such actions deserve to be hunted down and illiminated with extreme prejudice, by any covert agency of any country that does actually respect due process of the legal system.
> As far as I'm concerned, people involved in such actions deserve to be hunted down and illiminated with extreme prejudice, by any covert agency of any country that does actually respect due process of the legal system.
They have nothing to fear, then, as those countries wouldn't have covert agencies, even if they existed, which they don't.
I agree about the first part though. When losing (on the grand scheme, not necessarily on a single case like Assange) means you go to jail, you get extra motivated.
i believe so too. CIA has every witness to Assange's trial under surveillance and JTRIG are actively targetting them for harassment. anything to sabotage the defense.
i hope the fact of that leaks onto Wikileaks. then Assange walks for the same reason Ellsberg walked. FBI used illegal tactics to persecute Ellsberg before his trial, which the govt was too embarassed about revealing to continue his prosecution.
Though he did suffer some technical difficulties, he did not testify as the court ruled his testimony was not relevant to the case. Subtly is not even necessary.
"In the United Kingdom, Assange’s legal team has been allowed to enter this evidence into the public record. However, during a potential trial in the United States, it will likely be excluded as irrelevant because the Espionage Act does not allow a public interest defense."
"The Central Criminal Court in London was prepared for El Masri to testify. An interpreter was lined up for the ninth day of proceedings. However, technical problems prevented him from addressing the court beyond his written statement.
Prosecutors also objected to El Masri giving live testimony. According to Court News UK reporter Charlie Jones, that prompted Assange to stand up and proclaim, "I will not accept you censoring a torture victim's statement to this court.""
Other sources I've seen disagree, that Charlie Jones tweet blames the translator, and the prosecution has been discussing blocking this testimony for a few days now.
"Mr El-Masri was due to give evidence by video link, but, after a legal argument, presiding judge Vanessa Baraitser decided that it would be sufficient for his statement to be read to the court and he need not appear."
"There had been three days of intense discussion between the counsel and the judge, with the United States government objecting bitterly to Mr El-Masri being heard. A compromise had been reached that he could give evidence provided he did not allege he was tortured by the US Government. However, when he came to give evidence, Mr El-Masri was strangely unable to connect by videolink, even though the defence team had been able to speak to him by video a few hours earlier. Technical staff in the court having been unable to resolve the (ahem) technical issue, rather than simply postpone his evidence until a videolink had been established – as had happened already with two other witnesses when quality issues arose – Judge Baraitser suddenly decided to raise again the issue of whether el-Masri’s evidence should be heard at all."
"This hearing has frequently been interrupted by the strange incompetence of the Ministry of Justice in establishing simple videolinks."
"It was not Professor Feldstein’s fault the day finished in confused anti-climax. The court was unable to make the video technology work. For ten broken minutes out of about forty Feldstein was briefly able to give evidence, and even this was completely unsatisfactory as he and Mark Summers were repeatedly speaking over each other on the link."
Also playing with the times:
"Daniel Ellsberg was to give evidence this afternoon. Edward Fitzgerald QC applied for his videolink evidence to be heard at 3.15pm [(in England)] which is 07.15am in California where Dan lives. Baraitser insisted it could not be put back beyond 2.30 pm, thus forcing an 89 year old man [Daniel Ellsberg] to give evidence at 6.30am [(his local time)]. Simply stunning."
The use of internet was also intentionally restricted:
The judge "explained this by stating that the public could normally observe from within the courtroom, where she could control their behaviour. But if they had remote access, she could not control their behaviour and this was not in the “interests of justice”."
Yes. For those unfamiliar with video and phone testimony during court proceedings, even when they technically work, the defense doesn't have the same ability to normal cross-examination or monitoring that correct procedures are followed. It's like the case is always going off the rails.
An example is if somebody quotes from a document on the phone during a trial, but the document hasn't been submitted or cannot be found. What do you do next? Ask for a continuation for that one document? How about the second one? What if the reading is incorrect?
So to even attempt a bad video link is an injustice.
I find conspiracy theories exciting and compelling, but intellectually hollow. They are like junk food. They can even be right sometimes, just as pizza can nourish you.
But we are better off setting them aside and sticking with the mundane issues of electing sensible representatives, supporting investigative journalism, engaging in fact-based discourse.
I'm not convinced we are better off ignoring all conspiracy theories. There are real conspiracies to break the law in the world, and some of them have been perpetrated by the US government.
We have to look at the merits of each theory and decide whether it's batshit or not. Global conspiracy to fake a pandemic? Doesn't seem possible. A couple dudes in the CIA harassing a dude they tortured and then threatened to mess with if he talked? Not impossible.
The criminal acts the US government has been up to raise serious questions regarding what you suggest we do:
> electing sensible representatives
how can you do this when your own government harasses and intimidates people it doesn't like?
> supporting investigative journalism
how can there be investigative journalism if receiving information could turn out to be a felony if it's the wrong information?
> engaging in fact-based discourse
how can you do this when your own government is hiding relevant facts from you?
A conspiracy theory is just one possible explanation of events. There is nothing wrong with attempting validate it while also considering other possible explanations. The harm comes when a shadowy cabal is one’s answer to everything.
Conspiracy theories are ideas. Any particular theory may be 100% right, 100% wrong, somewhere in between, or it may be unknown/unknowable (too complicated or difficult to measure, the facts are classified, etc), like any other idea.
> But we are better off setting them aside...
How might a person know such a thing without doing something like running a parallel universe and trying the two approaches?
> It’s totally absurd that US can kidnap random people outside their country.
kidnap... and assassinate.
Is not the US people in any case, is their government. And some of those people seem to have severe and worrying sadistic undercurrents in their personality. As human beings, torturers are a real failure.
> Is not the US people in any case, is their government.
This a million times. I'm speaking broadly as I'm not from the US, however this applies pretty much to every country: "People are not their government" should be always considered when criticizing any nation or being criticized by others because of government politics. Identifying people with their government choices is the 1st step towards building hatred that will be used to convince weak minded citizen to enroll and invade that country. Most wars happened because governments screwed their own people convincing them there were enemies ready to kill them, where in fact there was nobody.
Well, you still get a dissonance, right? Either the US is a democracy, and the People are responsible, or it isn't, in which case the People are deluding themselves.
Both things could be true, but if you want to pick one possibility that is more true... have you ever spoken to an American? Of course we are deluding ourselves.
It's much more complex than this. Take QAnon and their well crafted and targeted disinformation for example; lots of people are falling into that idiocy, including people I know, and I'm on the other side of the planet.
Voting is a great tool, but it requires knowledge to be used properly. Someone realized that in modern society they don't need to bribe or threaten people anymore to have them vote candidate X, they just feed them false information ultimately obtaining the same result without any fear of consequences since no crimes were committed - all it needs is some obscure account somewhere and a few thousand likes by a click farm in the Far East and the "information" becomes legit.
Democracy works only if accompanied by knowledge and critical thinking, or it soon turns out into people being free to choose their own dictator.
> This a million times. I'm speaking broadly as I'm not from the US, however this applies pretty much to every country: "People are not their government" should be always considered when criticizing any nation or being criticized by others because of government politics.
Disagreed completely.
In a democracy, people are responsible for their governments. That's the whole idea of democracy. If you can pick your leadership you are responsible for who you pick and every single action they take. You get the credit for the good, and you get the blame for the bad. With great power comes great responsibility and whatnot.
In an autocracy where people cannot choose their leadership, it's more murky.
[edit] It's so weird to see this American blame shirking from the ground floor all the way to the president. "Well, I'm not responsible for the government just because I pick them," to staying home on Election Day and responding "well he's not my president," to POTUS' perennial "well, Obama and Hillary are really at fault."
Is nobody taking responsibility for anything anymore?
People can vote, but the are lots of things out of control. In my country people can do squat about the government actions for example against organized crime, as much as all common US citizen could not decide whether invade Iraq or not after 9/11. Many actions by governments lie outside of any control by the people, which I concur very often a good thing, but when things end up really bad and the government becomes an alien entity with its own agenda, then calling it democracy doesn't help much.
> In a democracy, people are responsible for their governments.
But what if we have a representative democracy instead? Then people's choice is limited to picking one of the options provided by dominant political parties; and the parties are responsible for providing those options.
Just imagine the idea of "representative X" applied to things other than democracy, to see what difference it makes. For example, "representative freedom" = you can't have it, but you can choose one of two people, and they will. Or "representative sex" = you are free to choose people who can actually have sex; feels great, doesn't it? Or "representative free speech" = you are not allowed to speak your mind, but here is a list of a few pre-approved people, choose one of them, and they will speak their mind freely. Isn't it amazing how different things get when they become "representative"?
I agree we should all inform ourselves and vote but this statement may be taking it too far.
If I'm presented with two candidates, neither of whom I agree with, what am I to do? If I can't trust a word of any politician, how can I make an informed decision?
What do you mean by responsibility? I assume you don't mean every American civilian should be prosecuted for the crimes of their government? If you don't mean this, please clarify what you mean.
Which country are you from? Are you responsible for all of their actions?
> In a democracy, people are responsible for their governments.
Last time I checked I don’t get to vote for policies directly. Last time I checked I didn’t get to vote for every representative position and in some cases people won those elections but didn’t even get a plurality of the votes.
Why exactly am I responsible for something I cannot control?
Err, NO, in democracy, people ARE the government. Maybe they don't represent you specifically or your friends, but they were voted in by your fellow citizens by majority.
Politicians, bar some exceptions, always represent the worst of given population. Sociopaths, power hungry, fucked up inside, very good presentation / talking. Always thinking how to use given situation and people around them to their advantage, and there can never be too many advantages.
The fact that people keep voting the same 1 / 2 parties over and over is a proof for that - nobody disagrees with them enough, en masse, to vote otherwise (or not vote).
The real shocker here is not that people do cruel things. Murderers carrying out abhorrent fantasies exist and existed everywhere, anytime.
Suppose I have such a personality, and that becomes known, my government then should do the appropriate medical and judical procedures.
When the government then goes "oh, here is 10k/month and a ticket to Macedonia and go live your dream", there is something truly, truly fucked up and it is not the individual in question.
And that grievance is a systemic one and therefor a responsibilty of the people should they have the intention to declare themselves as a democracy...
> And that grievance is a systemic one and therefor a responsibilty of the people should they have the intention to declare themselves as a democracy...
I believe the major issue that everyone affected likes to avoid is their profit of that behavior. Not necessarily torture itself, I don't think it helps for interrogations but may serve as a deterrent, but global power and regular war and demonstrations of strength. That gets you a lot of favorable trade deals, you get to be the world's reserve currency, and you can borrow without any limits. That's pretty good, and probably more than makes up for the insane military spending - and citizens profit from that as well.
I don't think there's a lot of motivation to be overly critical in that regard, much like most people won't be too critical of their company when they get half a million in total compensation.
The Jews are squeezing so hard now even average joe(80% are born followers) is seeing the wizard behind the curtain!
Prescott Bush made the cia for gods sake lol. These people have dominated for 4000 years until Christians fought back, who were gentiles who knew the teaching because of jesus, the king of the Jews, who sent 12 opposites out to teach the gentiles.
The isralites(Jews) killed their own king and denounce him to this day! Even Muslims, a religion that came along way after this fact 2000 years ago accepts the lamb of god, jesus.
Not Jews! They the only ones calling themselves gods chosen, no one else!
They lack empathy, its Real simple really! That's how they do what they do. Hard for most gentiles to understand, you know, been empathetic and all
Its also preposterous that Americans will continue to justify these heinous acts as "might makes right", and then go on with their day, ignoring their states immense crimes against humanity in their effort to 'get theirs'... but yeah, drop the ol' "Ma' Russians!" into the conversations, and heads explode. There is literally no difference between the chemical castration of Assange inside a prison, and what "th' Russians" can do with a tea cup. One is covert and duplicitous, and the other is overt - but the message is the same: Journalists who uncover state crimes are the enemy of the state.
It seems we are in the quandary of the masses. Until Americans start feeling the repercussions of their states war crimes and crimes against humanity, they will simply allow them to continue to occur. Making further terrorism pretty much inevitable, on one side, and further leaks from real patriots, on the other side.
Anyway .. Assange is the tip of the ice berg.
For as long as Americans continue to ignore the burning piles of rubble that are the product of their state, the leaks will continue.
I’m going to ignore all the subjective incendiary rhetoric and focus on this (slightly edited) line:
> [Those] who uncover state crimes are the enemy of the state.
This is an interesting point, considering Snowdon made public improper behaviour, which resulted in him fleeing the country, while (at least some of) the improper behaviour has been declared illegal behaviour by a court of law. Meanwhile Snowdon remains persona non grata.
I wonder if we can manipulate trump into freeing Assange and Snowden under the narrative “These heros exposed Obama’s crimes, you can be the hero who frees them”
(I know they are not “Obama’s” crimes but that’s the only way to get trump engaged, or maybe just “democrats” crimes)
I think he would run with it if only it didn’t set president for whistleblowers to blow the whistle on whatever he has done...I dont think he thinks deeply enough to consider secondary effects but those around him may
> I wonder if we can manipulate trump into freeing Assange and Snowden under the narrative “These heros exposed Obama’s crimes, you can be the hero who frees them”
Apparently, no, as Trump has much higher priority of "controlling" the press. See "Trump’s campaign against the press" from the testimony of Mark Feldstein, who's a Professor of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Maryland and a witness for defense in this process:
"Seen in this light, the administration’s prosecution of Julian Assange is part and parcel of its
campaign against the news media as a whole. Indeed, Assange’s criminal indictment under the US
Espionage Act is arguably its most important action yet against the press, with potentially the most
far-reaching consequences."
It is the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CFR who make the blotter ready for the CiC to stick his bloodied fingerprint on.
Being distracted by the scary orange puppet rhetoric is one thing - having the courage to face the criminal charges with integrity, at a state and cultural level, is another thing entirely.
The only reason the USA isn't having its leaders schackled in the docks of The Hague for the last 20 years of criminal murderous insanity, is the people of the USA don't think it necessary, or warranted.
That is the purpose of the leaks: to encourage an honest investigation by a just and fair society. Alas, the conditions for that cannot exist under secrecy regimes dictated by a military junta.
Its not rhetoric if you've had to dig your children out from under the rubble.
I'm not surprised this is a scary subject, and that it is immensely important to the American public that it be kept hidden away beyond the state secrecy walls of privilege.
The collateral damage video wasn't rhetoric, either. Again, innocent children being murdered for lies.
Let us not forget Assange's message: yes, the USA is committing atrocious crimes against humanity, on the regular, and expecting to be allowed to get away with it.
What part of the Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and US' War Crimes isn't incendiary? This is not a subject for sensitive feelings.
It is extremely important that discourse not be repressed for the sake of political expediency ...
If there were more awareness of the horrors, Assange wouldn't have been so necessary. If we want to reign in the war-mongers, we must hold them accountable.
The problem isn't your descriptions of the actions which Assange reported on. The problem is your use of phrases like "Ma' Russians" and your strange reference to a "chemical castration" of Assange.
I was explaining the issue to the commenter, since they seemed to be expressing honest confusion about why their comment comes across as incendiary. I certainly agree it's better to avoid engaging with inflammatory rhetoric, but we shouldn't let that become a refusal to help people moderate their tone when they don't mean to give offense.
I couldn't care a fig for tone policing. You should be getting challenged on this subject, if you think its something that we should be more 'mild mannered' about.
Genocide is happening, for fucks sake. CIA has 2000 secret torture/rendition sites. Is that really something you want people to be using 'inclusive language' to describe?
Perhaps you should have a session with the "empathy police".
Iraq lost 5% of its population because of these heinous criminal liars that still run America today. Thank goodness for Assange, letting the free world know!
America is bombing the fuck out of the world, and expects to be getting away with it - and the message in lobotomising Assange, is to let you and me know that we better not be trying to discuss this fact.
FUCK THAT. Get mad about what is being done to Julian Assange - because we are next.
I don't think there's some blanket obligation to be mild mannered. By all means, use incisive language to describe bad things! The problem is with passages like
> but yeah, drop the ol' "Ma' Russians!" into the conversations, and heads explode.
This isn't an attempt to vividly illustrate the problem or an expression of righteous anger. It's just trolling - it accomplishes nothing but inciting people to yell back at you.
It’s fact isn’t it? The US government as well as Americans themselves regularly use crimes done by Russia and China to distract from crimes done by their own government.
Why is it always brown people whose blood and bones are ground up in the gristmill of the American war machine? Doesn't that seem just a bit genocidal? Even in places like Latin America where the reptiles could choose among a variety of races as collaborators in their monstrous schemes, they somehow always ally with white people to kill indigenous people. This is going on right now in Bolivia, and Venezuela has had this potential for a long time, but historically one must take care to find an uncolored spot on the map. [0]
No one in this thread cares to "be taken seriously" by those who don't acknowledge recent history.
In any case, having 201.000 Americans killed in less than a year (after being goose-feeded with fake news to ignore the danger), does not feel like an improvement over the classical stuff. (Without forgetting the rest of covid's victims, of course).
It looks like you've been using HN primarily (if not exclusively) for political battle. That's against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, because it moves this place in exactly the opposite direction we want it to go. HN is supposed to be for curious conversation. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.
Are you kidding? This is absolutely fucking nonsense. I’ve been here for years primarily commenting on infosec related topics as that is where my expertise lies.
Insofar as you continue to allow political topics to remain on the site, which is not content that I submit, people are going to comment on it. When people post bullshit in these political threads, it motivates a response. I’m rarely, if ever, a top level comment.
The uptick in recent comments is simply due to the increasingly politically charged environment and the influx of submissions that are overtly political, or other users propensity to take conversations off topic by interjecting some ideological or partisan nonsense. Like jessaustin here race-baiting every thread and actually advocating domestic terrorism, for example.
You literally replied to a comment I made saying that genocide is not happening. It is, in fact, not happening.
You’ll notice that my comments of this nature are attempts to nip things in the bud and usually call for measured, civilized discourse. HN seems to have an influx of these wannabe communist revolutionaries trying to push their nonsense here. My replies do not advance particular positions, they are an attempt to keep things rational and encourage exposure and debate with opposing viewpoints without the character assassination and demonization that many can’t resist resorting to. Most of the time I’m defending viewpoints that I don’t even agree with.
Maybe you should just get serious about banning political stories. There are other sites for that.
I wasn't replying to a particular comment, but to your recent pattern of using the site. I know you've posted here for years about other topics. That's what I'm trying to persuade you to go back to. I totally get the feeling of needing to counter wrongness with rightness, but it all too easily turns into feeding it. The people on the other side are having the same experience of course.
We've had to ask you more than once before to stop doing this sort of flamewar on HN. If you keep doing it, we're going to have to ban you. I'm not going to ban you right now because you posted about octopuses and mopeds recently. But it's not acceptable to flame up the threads like this, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
You've got to find a way to hold a conversation about America's war crimes, and its very real crimes against humanity, without violent repression of speech - which is what your threats of account removal amount to.
This story is extremely relevant to your readership.
The title of this HN story is "Survivor of CIA Torture and Rendition Supports Assange at Extradition Trial", and here you are, dang, threatening to ban me for discussing America's war crimes, the very ones which were revealed to the world by Julian Assange.
You are LITERALLY using the very same playbook as Judge Baraitser: "America's crimes against humanity, its war crimes, and its criminal behaviour: SHALL NOT BE DISCUSSED OPENLY IN PUBLIC because: its too scary to the readership".
Yes, America's war crimes are scary. But no matter what you do, they're not going away. You must be prepared to discuss this and to maintain community while it is discussed, openly and honestly, in your forum. The HN community are extremely relevant to this discussion.
Dissuading open discussion about America's horrendous war crimes and diverting attention away from them is complicity.
I'm sure there is a story to be told about how HN censors stories critical of its military industrial masters. In fact, we can follow the money and come up with a very interesting question:
* What is Y-combinators/HN's connection with the KSA and how does that effect HN's reporting around the current genocide of Yemen? *
Perhaps we will read about it in future Wikileaks, or whatever cool tech news site that comes along to replace the smouldering pile of rubble that HN is inevitably to become, as a result of its administrators cowardice...
In the meantime, since you have made comments designed to intimidate me based on personally identifiable information I have posted on your web site:
I am hereby requesting immediate erasure of personal data concerning me according to Article 17 GDPR.
Please erase all personal data concerning me as defined by Article 4(1) GDPR.
Please delete the following personal data concerning me: all comments posted to the HN site under the 'fit2rule' account name.
I am of the opinion that the requirements set forth in Article 17(1) GDPR are fulfilled. You cannot claim an expection based on Article 17(3) GDPR either, particularly as I am not a public figure.
If I have given consent to the processing of my personal data (e.g. according to Article 6(1) or Article 9(2) GDPR), I am hereby withdrawing said consent for the entire process.
In addition, I am objecting to the processing of personal data concerning me (which includes profiling), according to Article 21 GDPR. I request that you restrict the processing of the data concerning me pending the verification whether your legitimate grounds override mine, pursuant to Art. 18(1)(d) GDPR.
If you have made the aforementioned data public, you are obliged pursuant to Article 17(2) GDPR to take all reasonable steps to inform other controllers, including search engine operators, who process the personal data listed above, that I have requested the erasure of all links, copies or replications. This applies not only to exact copies of the data concerned, but also to those from which information contained in the data concerned can be derived.
In case you have disclosed the affected personal data to third parties, you have to communicate my request for erasure of the affected personal data, as well as any references to it, to each recipient as laid down in Article 19 GDPR. Please also inform me about those recipients.
If you object to the requested erasure, you have to justify that to me.
My request explicitly includes any other services and companies for which you are the controller as defined by Article 4(7) GDPR.
As laid down in Article 12(3) GDPR, you have to confirm the erasure to me without undue delay and in any event within one month of receipt...
The flamewar that you started and perpetuated in this thread is not ok on HN, regardless of how right you are, or feel you are, on the underlying issues. You've done this many times on HN before and we've asked you repeatedly to stop. If you keep doing it, we're going to end up banning you. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24531609.
> .. in the United States, it will likely be excluded as irrelevant because the Espionage Act does not allow a public interest defense.
Remind me again, what made the USA any better than North Korea or any other off-the-rails criminal regime?
If this statement about the Espionage Act is correct, then why is there even a discussion whether Assange will get a fair trial in the USA? It's plain as daylight that he never will, even for that specific fact only.
In fact, any country that signed and ratified the UN's UDHR, should be barred from extraditing anyone to the USA. Especially for cases like these.
If this involved an African, Asian or a Middle Eastern country, the USA and EU would no doubt threaten with bombing the country into submission, if they would continue to violate basic human right in order to cover up their criminal actions.
A lot of people ask also why Snowden keeps "hiding" in Russia and doesn't come back to face the music.
It's because he's not even allowed to use the public good defense per the Espionage Act.
As for Assange, the poor man has already suffered enough, what the UN amounts to torture. This is despicable and anyone who is concerned about the Uyghurs, Rohingya etc. should voice a strong opposition to what is happening to Assange in the West.
P.S. His prosecution isn't even about the 2016 election, however you feel about that, it's about him exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. government, killing civilians, including knowingly journalists and laughing about it.
Snowden avoids the prosecution because even on a public trial he will get a life-long sentence since Espionage Act doesn't have an exemption for acting in the public interest.
until the Espionage Act is ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS, the war crimes and abuses of power exposed by Snowden and Assange will never be resolved.
Since 2013, I have come to view Assange and Snowden and future leakers and whistleblowers as necessary steps of the journey, but not the destination.
the destination is to create some contrived legal case that perfectly triggers multiple legal conditions which unlocks the door to be able to directly and openly challenge the espionage act in court. the US Intelligence Community have always gone to extraordinary contortions to prevent the Espionage Act itself from being invoked against the Press which could make it possible to challenge it. Even in Elsberg's case, his charges were dropped before SCOTUS could decide whether the Espionage Act applied to the Press and the Public Interest.
i think one reason why DOJ has been so rabid and vicious against Assange is because he is not a US Citizen, so they don't have to give him as much Freedom of Speech as they would an American.
i dont feel optimistic about Assange's case. if it was going to turn out good, that would have happened years ago.
i can only hope the spiritual successor to Wikileaks is led by an American who is wickedly clever enough to leak the right kind of top secrets that are scandalously in the Public Interest and thereby force a head on collision between SCOTUS, the Espionage Act and the First Amendment.
"Remind me again, what made the USA any better than North Korea or any other off-the-rails criminal regime?"
... is an intellectually offensive question.
Posed in the open, by someone on an 'American' blog, in perfect safety knowing there would not remotely ever be any repercussions for posing the question.
you don't know that there won't be repercussions. perhaps when i say "America is already at dystopian North Korean levels of mass propaganda", my IP address is stored in XKEYSCORE and my cell phone billing info is cross referenced and my name is put on a Watchlist.
perhaps when i try to apply to a FedGov job, some automated sytem for scoring Inside Threats uses that Watchlist, and determines i am a security threat, and i am denied the job.
perhaps that automated scoring system is sold to the private sector, and then i am also denied jobs and bank loans and housing and travel when the system rejects me for unspecified reasons, since the existence of the secret Watchlist will never be known outside of FedGov.
through the existence of numerous forms of mass surveillance exposed by Wikileaks, we know the machinery of an automated social credit system has already been built. it's operational. the only question is how far along are they in putting it to use to truly turn us into a superficially happier nation sized prison camp like North Korea.
The fact that you have to say “perhaps... perhaps... perhaps...” when you describe your authoritarian fantasy is all anyone needs to know. One does not need to similarly caveat North Korean or Chinese authoritarianism, you can see the gulags on Google maps.
Have there been human rights and privacy abuses by the US government? Yes. Is our government a bad parody of a dystopian sci-fi movie? Please, let’s keep ourselves grounded in facts.
The fact that you are able to post whatever you feel like typing is radically more freedom than we can presume is available to the average North Korean. Pull the other one, man.
And still US forces murder civilians in the Middle East without repercussions by drone and airstrike. Please explain to me why it would be wrong to carpet bomb the Rammstein airbase to take out the drone operations.
"you don't know that there won't be repercussions. perhaps when i say "America is already at dystopian North Korean levels of mass propaganda", my IP address is stored in XKEYSCORE and my cell phone billing info is cross referenced and my name is put on a Watchlist."
It's really sad how deep down the rabbit hole of delusional moral equivalence so much of the anti American bigotry on HN amounts to, and of course so ironic that this is all American-based.
If you want to work for US government spy apparatus, yes, there will be a loyalty test. And that is fine and normal, and it's the same everywhere.
Otherwise, you are free to say pretty much as you please, whenever you want, unless you're making bombs or calling for violence - even in the later case you can get away with it.
Thankfully, there are forces in the world that remain vigilant towards ensuring that you can do that. You can look on a map and it's fairly evident to see which places are fairly open and safe, and which are not.
> The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) confirmed nine years after that El Masri was “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded, and subjected total sensory deprivation—carried out in the presence of state officials of Macedonia and within its jurisdiction.”
> Macedonia’s “government was consequently responsible for those acts performed by foreign officials…Those measures had been used with premeditation, the aim being to cause Mr. Masri severe pain and suffering in order to obtain information,” the ECHR additionally found.
> (...)
> “The U.S. diplomatic cables revealed the extent of pressure brought upon the German authorities (and in parallel, relevant Spanish authorities) not to act upon the clear evidence of criminal acts by the USA even though by then exposed,” Goetz added.
Then some Americans are confused that many in the western world don't like American influence. I find it outrageous that these things happen, and I wouldn't want my government to consider such a country an ally.
I totally agree. First, many Americans don't support these acts, it's just beyond their control. And others do support them but either minimize them or believe they are justified for a greater good.
And a lot are totally clueless and just have no idea of what's going on.
There's a lot of propaganda, poor education and lack of information in the US. Just watch a presidential debate, it's a joke.
I know these is controversial, but this is what I personally think: (and even though a lot of this continued during Obama) Every American that voted for Bush' second term is partly responsible. It is evidently clear where the most political pressure to act like this has come from. Don't forget the NSADP was democratically elected. Every vote for the GOP is one to further legitimise these practices, and every voter is personally responsible for the way your country has headed as the writing was clearly on the wall. Just as ever member of the NSDAP has some responsibility for the holocaust, it should have been very clear to anyone paying attention that that party had some pretty extreme and objectionable view
German here - I absolutely agree. I think the way Hitler rose to power is such an important piece of history.
Nazi germany wasnt the first country to act like that. They didnt invent torture or mass killings, genocide, etc. It had happened before, everyone knew it, everyone knew that it can happen.
And yet they voted blindly and thought "ah, well, it wont happen here". And low and behold, a few years later it does.
I cannot feel sorry for people who vote out of habit and are then surprised that the government they voted for doesn't do what they silently hoped for.
I agree with what you said, yet can't help but think that everyone who knows about this kind of thing and still doesn't think twice about which party to vote for, is responsible in some way.
Every american is given a voice, to vote for the best party, the best candidate, based on what they know and believe. Voting is anonymous. You dont have to tell anyone what you voted for. Vote for a third party, or for whatever you think is best.
John Adams and George Washington believed a two-party state was a major threat to democracy, and it's pretty easy to see why.
The reality is Democrats and Republicans are about 6 inches apart on every single major issue. Compare the platforms of the "left" and "right" here to other major democracies worldwide, and you'll see.
Things are a little different with the current administration, but even that, the concrete policy and substance issues aren't all that far apart.
- Neither side supports socialized medicine.
- Neither side supports free or cheap college or doing anything about student debt.
- Neither side supports decriminalization or legalization of narcotics.
- Neither side is interested in reducing defense spending.
- Neither side is interested in immigration reform (as evidenced by the Obama administration having, for a long time, controlled both houses and the presidency and changing literally nothing).
- Neither side is interested in reforming the intelligence services or closing GITMO -- remember that?
- Neither side is interested in prison reform or policing reform. Police in America kill 10X as many people per capita as Canadian police kill. The only leader to actually implement any form of prison reform in decades was Donald Trump, credit where due. And that's likely only because he's not really a Democrat or a Republican.
- Both sides persecuted and prosecuted Asange and Snowden.
Really, what are the major points of policy differentiation? A 2% tax hike on the wealthy?
Until our governmental system is overhauled to allow for more democracy and less powerful individuals then the citizens really don't bare much responsibility for the actions of our masters. I live in a gerrymandered district with no real way to vote for my preferences and it doesn't look like it will get better anytime soon.
I have a really hard time with that answer. In a democracy each individual is directly and personally responsible for their government. That's the power and the responsibility associated with picking your leadership. You get credit for the good and the blame for the bad.
Yeah, that's true, gerrymandering is problematic and does stifle people's ability to express their political voice. Does gerrymandering make the US less of a democracy, then? I don't have an answer to that question, so curious your thoughts.
I think it does, yes. Voting in a gerrymandered region is pretty much just maliciously cargo-culted democracy. It might look like people engaging in a democratic action on the surface, but it doesn't have any effect.
It reminds me of the 'literacy tests' given to black voters, back in the Jim Crow era. We're doing this to help them participate in our democracy, the racists would say. But the reality was in fact the complete opposite.
The structure of the political system itself matters too - for example, this concentration of so much power into a single person, that the US and other countries have with the presidential model, gives them some very autocratic attributes as well.
I don't think it makes it less of a democracy, per se. after all, officials are still elected through a public vote, and the gerrymandering is carried out by democratically elected leaders. tbh I'm not even sure how you would get rid of it. political boundaries have to be drawn somewhere to begin with, and sometimes they may need to move if the population shifts over time. I dunno how you could make the current party in power redraw the lines in a way in a way that's fair to the opposition.
I do think your claim about citizens in a democracy ultimately being responsible for the actions of their government is a bit much though, or at least not very useful. individual voters may have opposed the victor in the election, or they may have grudgingly voted them in to avoid an even worse candidate.
The criteria is simple. Does gerrymandering spread power to the people or does it concentrate it in the hands of the few? If the latter, then it makes for less of a democracy.
I haven't really picked many of my leaders. Most of the government is appointed by the president so I have no say in that. I only get two choices for president neither of which represent me much at all. My congressional district is gerrymandered so I don't get a say there. I have objectively close to 0 influence in how my government works or the decisions it makes.
If we ever fix our government to add more democracy or operate more on the opinions of the citizens then I might feel connected to what my government does but as it stands now there's very little connection between me and others around me and the government that takes actions on the world stage.
the gerrymandering is a really important issue. my city is split into n districts (where 10 < n < 15), each of which elects a representative to the city council. the city votes overwhelmingly blue, but there are clusters of people who mostly vote red in the more affluent neighborhoods. there are enough red voters (roughly 10% of total) that, if they were concentrated in one or two districts, they would actually have a chance of winning a couple council seats. but the democrats have been very careful to slice all red-leaning neighborhoods right down the middle to nullify their votes.
I'm not arguing the city would be better off with more republicans in office, but it's a good example to show how even affluent people can be totally disenfranchised in a political system. no matter how effectively these people mobilize, they will never win an election, even at the most local level, in the foreseeable future.
A single district electing say 20 people via a single transferable vote would be far more representive. The problem isn’t district boundaries, it’s first past the post.
Sortition with incumbency: if an incumbent wants to “run” again, flip a coin. All empty seats are filled by randomly choosing from a pool of volunteers.
Has the nice property of being well-nigh incorruptible, cheap to implement, and perfectly representative of the population interested in serving.
I also like the fact that it provides direct agency as a “voter” (volunteer to serve), rather than indirect agency (vote for a volunteer).
America isn't a pure Democracy in the sense of Plato's Republic.
America is a Representative Democracy. we vote, but we are powerless to change what our Representatives do on our behalf.
by the way, this is really where the root idea of a "Deep State" existing comes from. We vote for Obama to close Gitmo, then he doesn't do it and we never know why. We never voted for illegal NSA domestic mass surveillance, yet here we are and it's normalized. We never voted for CIA renditions, black sites, torture and political assassinations, yet here we are. We never voted for the Federal Reserve to give trillions of dollars to the richest megabillionaires to park that wealth in real estate and price ordinary people out of affordable housing, yet here we are.
it's no longer a crazy conspiracy theory to look at the catastrophic effects of FedGov and how nothing ever improves and conclude the reason is because the govt we think we have is not really in control, but rather a secret State-Within-a-State is in control. a Shadow Govt, a permanent class of faceless bureaucrats wearing dark suits who operate the machinery of Govt and who flaunt the efforts of our elected Representatives and who ignore the will of the voters.
if there ever was an entity that called for extravagent levels of hyperviolence unseen in history to overthrow it, the Deep State is that entity.
You seem to think that if a party does not accomplish its policy objectives (closing gitmo, DACA) because the other party prevented it from accomplishing those objectives, it does not support them? interesting take :)
In 2009, 2010 and 2011, Obama was President and the House and Senate were both Democratic. Who was stopping Obama from closing GITMO during those three years? This was a campaign promise after all. Did DREAM'ers not exist at this time?
GITMO never closed because the US didn't find countries super willing to take in the detainees, and felt it would be "too distasteful" to let them stay in the US proper. Not a good case for violating human rights law, IMO, but to quote POTUS "it is what it is."
1993, 1994, 1995, Clinton was President and the House and Senate were both Democratic. Clinton's big immigration reform bill was the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. It's purpose was to "[strengthen] the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system — without punishing those living in the United States legally."
Clinton created the mass-deportation machine in use today. Clinton's bill made it harder to immigrate to the US. Clinton created the 3-year and 10-year re-entry bars that continue to separate loved ones to this day. If an unlawful resident marries a US citizen, they're entitled to a green card but they can't apply for it from within the US but as the minute they leave they get a 10-year re-entry bar.
The last guy to grant amnesty to the undocumented was Reagan in 1986, and he was, last I checked, a Republican.
At some point you've gotta stop blaming the other guy.
Democrats are not the party of immigration, legal or illegal.
Clinton was in fact a centrist "third-way" democrat who often compromised or coopted Republican issues, e.g. welfare reform.
Obama was not as much of a centrist but he was obstructed heavily by the opposition.
I'll continue to blame the people who vote 90% in one direction over the ones who vote 90% the other lol.
Edit: you added some specific comments about immigration. This is correct, Democrats are not very pro-immigration. They are more pro-immigration than the GOP, e.g. DACA order vs. DACA repeal, but the two parties are pretty close on immigration. There is a much bigger gap on issues like healthcare.
Even healthcare, though, what's the Biden playbook on healthcare?
"Instead of starting from scratch and getting rid of private insurance, he has a plan to build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate." This is a quote from the Biden campaign site.
As though letting anyone enroll in Medicare is "starting from scratch."
Compared to the Trump plan on healthcare which roughly amounts to: "Leave the Affordable Care Act in place because there really is no other option that anyone can come up with."
So, the Democratic plan is to leave private insurers be, so long as they cover pre-existing conditions. Which is the Republican plan. The difference is one is framed positively and the other negatively? Bumping up vs ignoring Medicare and Medicaid financing? Maybe? Even that's not clear from the Biden site.
The issue is the system is broken entirely, and both sides plan to move the deck chairs around -- one six inches to the left, and one six inches to the right. This was equally true of DACA. Leaving people in a perpetual state of deferred action parole via executive order is not a solution to anything.
You’re arguing because modern Left positions haven’t successfully passed into law, that the parties are fundamentally the same?
A good half the county would strongly disagree with what you feel - and that they’ve blocked those from passing isn’t proof that the system is failing, it’s proof it’s working. Obama got his healthcare plan. Every president usually gets maybe one or two bigger things they want, not all. It’s a sign that it’s working. Remember, you’re in a democracy, and about half of the people don’t agree with DACA, increased immigration, single payer...
I’m arguing if you set the rhetoric aside the party platforms are largely the same. The Overton window is shifted so far to the right in the US the two parties are basically “right or center-right,” and “far right.” There is no left. From a purely policy perspective they’re very similar.
There are clear and obvious differences in how the party operates and which side is on team Science for instance, but the core policy issues just aren’t all that different.
Strong disagree. I don’t get this line of reasoning at all. First of all you have multiple factions within each party that strongly disagree - on the left it ranges from extreme socialists to populist liberals (in decline) to neolibs and hawks. You had Bernie almost winning the primaries this year. On the right you have tea party libertarians, you have evangelicals, you have national populists now, and you have your neocons.
Now you could say neocons and neolibs did dominate for a while, and yea that has some truth. But it’s not so true today.
The two party system is really interesting because within each party you really do have diversity, and then they all compromise with each other. The dems are doing that this year. They have to do that, or else they lose their electorate. The parties move around constantly. Ron Paul moved the needle. Al Gore brought forward environmentalism. The Liberals have changed wildly over the last 30 years from being more middle/low class focused to being the party of the rich, of tech, and shifting towards focusing on minorities. That they were more aligned for a bit doesn’t prove anything.
Look at how Trump is remaking the right. It’s been fascinating and he’s done a sort of garbage cleaning on their platform.
Look at how Bernie’s success has radically pushed the left.
This is what I mean by the Overton window being shifted so far right. There are no "extreme socialists" in the Democratic wing. AOC is center-left, Bernie is pretty much center.
"Extreme socialist" would be arguing that the state should own the means of production. Until AOC starts arguing for nationalizing Google as a means of making core internet infrastructure public, for instance, I wouldn't worry about the "extreme socialists."
Those are things the base are demanding, but the party itself is rejecting. Or by "four" did you mean people in congress instead of four issues? Because it's more accurate to say about four fringe democrats are pushing those policies than to say the democrat party is endorsing those policies.
You’re exaggerating so much it’s just lying. The party is adopting them slowly and surely.
Tell me Bernie didn’t win a significant portion of the vote and all the early primaries twice now? Joe Biden doesn’t support universal healthcare and very high taxes including a huge raise on capital gains, he doesn’t have a running mate who calls for reparations? He hasn’t totally changed on policing? Elizabeth Warren is suddenly a minor player in the party when her and Bernie combined had a significant chunk of the debate time and raise as much money as anyone? When it’s convenient for your argument you suddenly claim they are minor, when they aren’t.
And yes all those positions are a big move left for American politics.
And I’m just sticking with the economic issues, socially we’ve moved much further left.
The general position that we’ve moved right is laughable, I’m still waiting on examples.
They are largely the same because the alternatives fail in various ways: they fail to finance their campaigns, i.e. they fail to get aristocratic backing, and/or they fail to appeal to the tiny minority of most motivated participants, i.e. primary voters.
Also, the two parties have conspired to put in all kinds of barriers, at the state and local level, to make it difficult to unseat their primacy.
But to say they just aren't all that different, ignoring the effect of consistency over time, is like suggesting the pressure differential above and below an airfoil isn't that different. It is true, but it's not a complete answer either.
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."
Chomsky was dead wrong about his heirarchy of languages and he set back computing by 50 years. He has also been wrong about geopolitics, since he ends up supporting the very Western Imperialism that he rails against.
> "Police in America are subject to 10x more violence per capita as Canadians."
Citation needed.
Especially as studies show that increasing militarization of the police force leads to more civilian deaths [1], and the trend towards militarization has been stark and pronounced in the US. [2] The issue is really that the US uses police as customer service for life and as front-line mental health treatment due to lack of proper socialized medicine. They are also trained to shoot first and ask questions later -- to treat everyone as a potential threat to their lives.
However, let's take what you say as fact. This points to a deep failure in society that needs to be addressed. People are products of their society, and if society is more violent in America then some serious introspection needs to be done. Looking at 10X per capita and shrugging it off as "well that's just America for you" is the problem.
Thats the problem with democracy: the people own the mistakes of those they elect. Dont like what they do? Vote them out of office. Arrest them. Jail them. If the system fails, fix the system.
Voting doesn't work for the most important issues, where human rights are being severely violated.
It took a civil war for the end of slavery to begin in the US.
It took decades of terrorism for the Irish to stop being as subjugated by the British in Northern Ireland.
And so on.
History indicates that what you really need in the US right now is some violent, direct action against those committing human rights atrocities. Voting isn't going to do shit.
Are you going to offer any supporting evidence at least like the post you are rebuking? All of human history seems to suggest violence is the most available resource for achieving any sort of change.
Take an inspiration from countries that get proper democracy right - like Switzerland. You can have public vote on anything, just gather enough signatures and it will happen. Result will be binding to government, whatever it means.
This of course relies on population to be at least slightly smart and not dumb herd of easy to manipulate sheeps, but that's a basic premise of democracy in general.
That's a rather childish erosion of a topic discussed, I presume you don't have anything substantial to add. Currently its the most free country in the world on many levels, and it shows in many aspects like people happiness, low criminality etc.
As for WWII, try to come up with something deeper than parroting this, ie how Swiss took tons of refugees that would face deportation and death, while being surrounded by Axis from all directions. How they decided to stop at one point because they didn't have enough food to feed their population, but Geneva canton kept taking refugees in regardless. They helped Allies' secret services with undermining axis in numerous ways, ie keeping the post in Campione d'Italia to subvert Duce's regime.
Its way more than many other 'neutral' countries done during WWII. And mistakes they made, they owned them, admitted them and paid compensations. What more do you want?
Direct democracy always beats representative democracy. In the representative democracy, people have not voted for the content of the laws that the law makers pass. That's why Rousseau calls "representative democracy" slavery.
Direct democracy can work in small countries. Will it work in a country with 150M or 300M people? Will it work? Maybe, one has to schedule voting every 6 months, just like a train schedule.
Yea, except direct democracy leads to government scope creep, if you want that, move to Europe and get nannied.
I don’t see us anywhere near a failed experiment and until anyone can make that case strongly, changing our fundamental structure is off the table. 3rd highest GDP per capita, most innovative country by far, extremely high tourism rate, most diverse country in multiple ways, consistently expanding healthcare / best cancer treatment the world / most innovative drug research, hugely successful progressive social movements, most philanthropic, cities that give the highest amounts of social welfare in per capita terms, you can go on.
Of course you can point out many bad things, but that doesn’t invalidate that it’s not failing, just that it’s not perfect - and to be honest, much of the failures to me look like local ones, not Federal ones. Take Chicago for example.
We need diversity of governance so we can find out what rule of law works best in the long run. Let Europe experiment with more direct democracy. Look at Singapore, Rwanda for the other side. Let the experiments run so long as they don’t trample on basic human rights. America is flawed, but for the same reason Google Chrome shouldn’t win out the browser wars, Representative Democracy should stay, it matches up well on the stats I care about, and it tends not to trample on freedoms nearly as much (something something three lions and a zebra).
"Scope creep" is orthogonal to the issue Rousseau raised: representative democracy is a form of slavery. And in this slavery, masters are law makers; slaves are 99% of the population. The beneficiaries are K-street people, the elite from media, c-suites, politicians, the super wealthy, etc.
The representatives are the slaves, if anything. Look how they can’t even keep their own opinions, they are forced to change to appease their base. Obama was against gay marriage. He wasn’t “free” to keep believing that: if he didn’t stop believing it, he was out. Period. Who is the slave? And it isn’t just rhetoric. If they don’t pass laws the people want, they’re out. Sure, they can enrich their cronies along the way. But you’re painting it way too black and white.
I do agree that K street holds too much power, not politicians. And politicians aren’t totally corrupt, just about half or so.
Just to be clear here, are you saying that you're more disgusted by the idea of violent, direct action against those committing human rights atrocities?
Rather than by those committing the human rights atrocities?
This is America dude. If you don't like our Founding Fathers and you don't like the Union Army, you might consider relocating to some mythical land whose history isn't soaked in blood.
Would you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which politics they're battling for or against, because it's against the intended spirit of the site and actually destroys it.
(You've also repeatedly been posting flamebait comments and breaking HN's rules in other ways too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to them?)
Talking about someone having 'been beaten' by US while China literally puts 100's of thousands in concentration camps merely for being of a specific ethnicity ... as their organs are nabbed by the elite via 'body part' black markets.
All these issues have to be put in context: the scale, the type of abuses, the proportionality, the context, the risk etc..
9/11 was a 'very scary' moment in history, the likelihood that others were planning to do the same was very high, and legit terrorist organizations were operating around the world.
The response to 'non-uniformed irregular attack' was necessarily going to have to be equally as asymmetric, i.e. getting at bad people in the locations they were working form, as opposed to a battle field.
It gets a little bit pedantic to discuss 'human rights' when in conflict, people are exterminated 'in accordance with all UN/International laws and rules' sometimes pretty arbitrarily. For example, the teenager Omar Khadr who killed a US Medic on the battlefield was injured, and about to die. It was US special forces who them saved him, ironically so he could spend a long time in Guantanamo.
The paradox of the fact that were he not of 'special interest' - he would be 100% dead, and nobody, not 'Amnesty International' or the UN would put up a fuss, as he was shot lobbing grenades at medics.
US and EU laws are not designed for acute, wartime scenarios, the only real question is how rational and reasonable the management of force can be applied without breaking too many humane boundaries, and, how many 'mistakes' we are willing to make.
The CIA black cells are definitely a stain, but in the grand scheme of history, it's nothing. Civil, lawful and humane order was otherwise broadly maintained.
This is just more whataboutism, and if you think that the US atrocities are excusable because of scale, you should ask the 37 million people displaced in the Middle East, and the relatives of the ~3 million dead.
Or you could also go to Vietnam and Laos, and notice the kid that gets blown up by a US mine every few days, or go notice the damage of Agent Orange, or go to the mass graves where millions lie buried.
Before American intervention, the Vietnamese Communists had already murdered up to a million of their own citizens in various purges and 'land reforms', including deaths in forced labour camps.
During the war, there were mass arbitrary detainments, forced labour and killings by the Communists both of their own citizens, and execution of S. Vietnamese families and officials by subterfuge. The North Allied Viet Cong routinely executed civilians for political purposes.
After the war, the North Vietnamese Communists dragged 10's of thousands of S. Vietnamese out into the streets and executed them in cold blood.
They then put 100's of thousands into forced labour camps.
By at least one historians estimation (see below), about 250 000 people died due to impoverished conditions.
That very often people don't know these things says a lot about the lazy, 'comic book' intellectualism regarding such past events that basically makes it impossible to take anything more seriously than a random reddit-thread argument. And even worse, that anyone would even dare compare mass murder on this scale to terrible events like 'Mai Lai' (which actually were isolated however terrible) or even US government action more broadly is completely ridiculous.
Here is the range of democide in Vietnam during this era [1]
Fighting oponents in an offensive war is 100%, no question, muder.
Equivocating people that died in one of the poorest countries in the world after a war where more explosives were dropped than during WW2 is ridiculous.
Finally, 2/3 of your sources literally come from a party in the war and are thus completely unreliable. Find a source that is not aligned with and does not receive money from either Vietnam or the US. If you can't, then the conclusions drawn from that have to written off.
Finally, if you are going to be using biased sources and equivocating definitions so that you can have a shadow of an argument based on misguided semantics, please refrain from insulting your interlocutor.
While you're correct that historically, violence is very often required to redress these atrocities, and you're very correct that this is an uncomfortable fact that we like to ignore, the time for violence is when there is absolutely, positively, no other option. And we're not there yet. Very far from it, and there is still hope that it won't be needed.
When a hundred million people will be on the street, and fire is opened on protesters, then is the time. Starting violence as a popular movement for human rights is not a good option.
The reason why it works in China is because, by and large, the people see their life improving and will support the government until there will be prolonged stagnation, if at all.
But yes, I meant it as a figure of speech more than anything.
"Violence is the foundation of law" is something I read in some philosophy of law books. I think it is in HLA Hart's or someones. While parroting the rule of law to the submissive, the rulers (or the beneficiaries of the current law regime) will hide the foundations of the existing law regime.
No the problem with democracy, we’ll the USAs in particular is there exists no department or task force whose sole duty is to enforce the constitution at every level and to imprison those in government positions who abuse their powers for personal gain or immoral purposes.
You would be surprised. There is a strong vein of jingoism running through the US that wants to see this sort of stuff. They believe that, by being harsh against domestic and foreign enemies of the United States, we can assert our position of dominance on the world stage. Just check out bumper stickers on pickup trucks in Texas.
You might want to read about operation Gladio and the extent of activities. The pretense of defending Europe is apparently good enough to even run a secret military group, while also making sure no US unfriendly group takes power.
I personally feel that America SHOULD pull influence/military completely out of Europe as they are well recovered from WW2 and should now be able to afford to have full militaries to handle any bullies in the region. We should stop all our foreign wars and are more or less doing that under Obama and now Trump. Let the Europeans deal with the Middle East since it is their backyard and not ours. I do think we should keep influence in East Asia though provided that Japan, Taiwan, Korea would like us to stick around. That's a sane foreign policy. I'm sure the Europeans will be angels in maintaining their political sovereignty.
> Let the Europeans deal with the Middle East since it is their backyard and not ours.
You have to admit there's two sides to that, though. The fact that the EU doesn't _have_ to defend itself reduces the incentive to do so. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we were to learn that the USA (pre-Trump) lobbies EU countries to keep their defense budget low, as that maintains dependence of EU on the USA.
But I 100% agree with you. Pull USA influence out of Europe - that's the best way to force Europe to take its self-defense seriously.
What strikes me with the US is that they can be very progressive on some issues (e.g. lgbt rights), yet totally backward on others (torture, death penalty, mass incarceration and so on...).
The former is distraction for the others. The left in USA has been convinced (or convinced itself) that identity politics is more important than human rights.
Yep, the two major parties are "center-right" and "far-right" politically. There are some leftists but they aren't represented, and because of the two-party system they won't be. Two parties ~= one party.
On what grounds? AOC, like Sanders, advocates for centrist policies like those in the UK. AOC is a left leaning centrist. The rhetoric in the US does label her and Sanders extreme left but that’s evidence in favour of my point - there is no left in the USA.
Who is the USA’s version of John McDonnell telling us all that there’s a lot to learn from Das Kapital?
AOC is centre left, somewhere between Canada’s ruling Liberal party and the NDP currently endorsing them (its a minority government this time). NDP is a little further left IMO but not far off.
>The left in USA has been convinced (or convinced itself) that identity politics is more important than human rights.
I disagree. I think we had torture so that a President could look tough on National Security as a re-election strategy. Not-torturing people and "identity politics" are not mutually exclusive, there is no reason that we couldn't have both. "Identity politics" is fundamentally about human liberty and the dignity of the individual, a.k.a. individualism, which is also the same moral foundation that most arguments against torture rest on. Advancing the rights of the individual advances the case against torture.
In practice, human rights do take a back seat to identity politics. One of the most widespread forms of torture in the world, female genital mutilation, is out of bounds even for criticism, in the eyes of the typical person of the “left” in the U.S., and many Western European countries, today. Those who object to this barbarism, inflicted upon millions of girls every year, are actually, somehow, called “racists” for doing so.
You can not consider the way in which the “left” regards Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and seriously think that this crowd considers human rights to be even of passing importance.
As a leftist myself, I can't recall ever talking to another leftist who supported female genital mutilation, or called someone a racist for criticizing it. I think you're talking out your butt
They've developed a false argument. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a vocal critic of female genital mutilation, but many of her other positions are islamophobic. Positions like "we are at war with Islam and it must be defeated."
In reality, I can both oppose female genital mutilation and consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali racist.
> In reality, I can both oppose female genital mutilation and consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali racist.
Of course you can. But became sufficiently famous doing so, and you will probably also find yourself on some list of "problematic" people.
In case I am completely wrong about this, the best way to convince me would be to provide a name of a recent famous speaker against female genital mutilation who is considered politically correct.
> Those who object to this barbarism, inflicted upon millions of girls every year, are actually, somehow, called “racists” for doing so.
I am vehemently opposed to female genital mutilation. Even with HN's overly large number of contrarians and trolls, I claim no one can write a convincing argument that my previous sentence is in any way racist.
As long as you speak as if female genital mutilation exists in a vacuum, as long as you carefully avoid mentioning that some cultures are more supportive of this practice than others, as long as you do not point out that some girls are at much greater risk than the general population and that any meaningful prevention needs to focus on them... you are okay. This also makes it impossible to suggest any policy with a realistic possibility to actually reduce female genital mutilation.
I'm not saying it's bad to have both. It's bad to have identity politics without first having human rights. Human rights are the foundation on which to build an equal society. Attempting to achieve equality before a even a right to life is secured is perverse and cannot work.
Is it no wonder that the police in USA murder black people, when the state also does so?
They'll probably have more time to concentrate on basic human rights soon with the Republicans sure to vote in an anti-gay, anti-abortion, racist, anti-women's rights SCOTUS judge. There won't be any "swing vote" anymore. Roe v. Wade is history unless the democrats win both houses and the Presidency and can add 3 more left leaning SCOTUS judges. Say goodbye to voter rights, minority rights, and anything even slightly related to queer rights.
This is because there is almost no US left. What you call the left are liberals, and liberals have always been like this (See: Pete Seeger's song "Love Me I'm a Liberal".
What does identity politics have to do with human rights, and why does one preclude the other? Your statement makes it out to seem that you simply don't like what you consider "identity politics" and wanted to bring that into the discussion, regardless of how irrelevant it is.
GP is rightfully pointing out that political discourse is far often centered on identity politics to the exclusion of more important topics such as human rights.
No one is saying that one precludes the other except you.
Like someone else said, which rights are being displaced by "identity" politics? Once again, this is nothing but white anxiety about the public discourse concerning race. Nothing more.
The U.S. is not a monolith. Even I, as an individual, have contradictory traits. The U.S. is the outcome of vast government, corporate, and individual actions across a large, geographically dispersed population with enough money and power that when we make a mistake, everyone gets hurt.
1. Until June 16, 2020, that you could be fired for being gay or transgender. And that's not even a blanket ruling, as religious institutions in the US are basically exempt from the Civil Rights Act protections.
2. It's still illegal to use one bathroom or another as a transgender person depending on which state you're in.
3. Transgender people are not allowed in the US military.
The list goes on, that's just kinda off the top of my head.
Do you think it's beneficial for the US military to accept transgender people who, according to dozens of studies, have substantially higher rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and other negative side effects?
Additionally, some of the hormone blocking drugs can cause bone loss (presenting a real physical risk).
Obviously, this has innumerable risks in a military environment from an objective standpoint. In fact, even post-transition, suicidal ideation is still orders of magnitude higher than average.
This comment won’t look good on you in a few years, I’m sure, and it reminds me of the kind of things people used to say about accepting women into the armed forces.
You pass basic training just the same so half your arguments are null right there. If you can’t pass basic training they don’t care what’s between your legs, you’re going home.
How does basic training eliminate suicide ideation?
Do you think basic training is enough to identify the risks associated with the bone density loss seen in some clinical transgender treatments? My understanding is that problems associated with that side effect could manifest at any time.
Care to share? Other minorities experiencing discrimination do not report similarly high levels of suicidal ideation, so I'm extremely doubtful of this claim.
Some groups in the US are very progressive on some issues. We still have larges swathes of the country that are backwards and like the torture that is mentioned in the article.
A lot of comments are (rightfully) condemning American atrocity, but let’s not lose sight that it is defense for Assange as well.
His actions clearly came with the moral imperative of whistleblowing - even just this one example shows the humanitarian crimes that would go unrevealed if the leaked documents weren’t published.
There’s just no way to pretend like Assange caused harm or violated law - whistleblowing is not stealing, it’s not treason, it’s not endangerment of affected government perpetrators. It’s the exposure of mass scale criminal murder and torture.
The problem I have with him is that his massive leaks were politically motivated.
The helicopter who shot journalists, that movie was genuine, and a proper leak. All the diplomatic cables being leaked? Clinton's e-mails? I don't believe all of that was in the public interest. He fell in the trap of making it political, us vs them (why he went in bed with the Russians), and disregarding operational safety.
I don’t see any basis it could be disputed in the case of the diplomatic cables. This very witness’s testimony proves it (as his torture and subsequent efforts by the US to pressure Germany and Spain to take no action when the criminal nature of it was learned - it was only brought to light because of the leaked cables, as explained in this post).
These facts render it moot what you or I might personally think about his political motivations. Not only are such speculations not a basis for any of the charges, but the very evidence itself (the cables) requires us to see the humanitarian imperative that they be leaked and thus to view leakers and publishers as whistleblowers, setting all speculated internal motives we can’t prove (and which don’t supersede the moral imperative here) aside.
In the case of the DNC email leaks, I could see a better argument that it was political, but then it also wouldn’t matter. None of the Espionage Act charges or accusations of putting US agents in grave harm are based on leaked DNC emails, only Iraq War leaks and the diplomatic cables. It would be awfully hard to prove any serious harm from publishing the DNC emails - and also the standard for publishers protected in that case is much higher. Keep in mind all that is proved that he did is publish them (no different than tons of other news outlets).
My point isn't that there's no useful content in the cables; my opinion is that it wasn't screened well. The data was dumped, not carefully screened. Assange M.O. changed in that regard, somewhere in the past 10 years, and that is the moment where I started to believe his opponents had a point.
> In the case of the DNC email leaks, I could see a better argument that it was political, but then it also wouldn’t matter. None of the Espionage Act charges or accusations of putting US agents in grave harm are based on leaked DNC emails, only Iraq War leaks and the diplomatic cables. It would be awfully hard to prove any serious harm from publishing the DNC emails - and also the standard for publishers protected in that case is much higher. Keep in mind all that is proved that he did is publish them (no different than tons of other news outlets).
It pretty much affected the outcome of the election up to the point that we USA got an orangutan in office. It is something Russian troll farms and Cambridge Analytica were also trying to do. All three's actions affect our democratic process in a negative way (ie. we want stability not chaos right before an election). Is it basis to get him prosecuted via Espionage Act? No, but that Act is retarded either way; lets look at other laws instead. How about illegal access to a remote computer? Then we're getting to more fair waters. Another one is putting innocent lives in danger by leaking sensitive data.
By every account in the extradition hearing, Assange was obsessed with carefully screening the material and copiously considered the costs and moral imperatives in cases when an identifying piece of information had to be included.
The testimony of John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count (which deeply depended on Wikileaks materials to corroborate many illegal civilian deaths in the Iraq war) is particularly clear on this. He had direct knowledge of the processes Assange used, in conjunction with other major news agencies including the New York Times and The Guardian, to redact as much identifiable information as possible, and even revealed significant details about the software they built to do named entity removal and to extract entries from dictionaries and so forth, across tens of thousands of documents.
It is pure myth that Assange lacked careful, discerning effort to redact materials.
As for your response about the DNC emails I think you have it quite backwards. Assange did not destabilize any election or play any role in Trump being elected. The DNC did that by the behavior that the leaked emails revealed.
The DNC members destabilized the election and created uncertainty and outrage that Trump capitalized on. The DNC members and officials did that, not Assange.
You don't think it's in the public's interest to know that one of the two parties of our broken two party system is explicitly subverting a democratic process to get "their person" nominated? Given that getting nominated to one of the two parties is the only viable way to get elected, anything that compromises the integrity of the nomination process is frankly more important than the final voting process.
I fail to see how being political is a relevant distinction, it fundamentally just means that something is contested. Not necessarily that there is any good reason for it to be contested. Utterly horrific things can be accepted and 'not political' and the only sane approach contested and declared 'political'.
State terror shouldn’t be safe. It‘s perpetrators deserve far more than just public exposure of crimes. For all I care post their names, photos and real time position data online. Let them hope for imprisonment in a state that observes their human rights.
This is your regular reminder that Russian interference in the US election of 2016 took the form of discouraging Democrats to vote by telling them that both parties were just the same. So, when Hacker News is suddenly full of topics like this, with commenters earnestly agreeing with each other that both parties are just the same and nothing will ever change, it’s worth being a little skeptical.
Not trying to be extra cynical but it sounds like they should've just disappeared the guy after torturing him. I wonder if the people responsible aren't kicking themselves now for not doing it.
Unless there was a lot media or government attention in this case, it'd be quite easy to point the blame at some terrorist group in Afghanistan and walk away.
233 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadThey'll be made well aware that their "way of life" and "reality as they know it" literally depends on the success of their work. Considering how these people are part of a criminal enterprise, it can be argued it's actually a true self-fulfilling prophesy.
As far as I'm concerned, people involved in such actions deserve to be hunted down and illiminated with extreme prejudice, by any covert agency of any country that does actually respect due process of the legal system.
They have nothing to fear, then, as those countries wouldn't have covert agencies, even if they existed, which they don't.
I agree about the first part though. When losing (on the grand scheme, not necessarily on a single case like Assange) means you go to jail, you get extra motivated.
i hope the fact of that leaks onto Wikileaks. then Assange walks for the same reason Ellsberg walked. FBI used illegal tactics to persecute Ellsberg before his trial, which the govt was too embarassed about revealing to continue his prosecution.
"In the United Kingdom, Assange’s legal team has been allowed to enter this evidence into the public record. However, during a potential trial in the United States, it will likely be excluded as irrelevant because the Espionage Act does not allow a public interest defense."
"The Central Criminal Court in London was prepared for El Masri to testify. An interpreter was lined up for the ninth day of proceedings. However, technical problems prevented him from addressing the court beyond his written statement.
Prosecutors also objected to El Masri giving live testimony. According to Court News UK reporter Charlie Jones, that prompted Assange to stand up and proclaim, "I will not accept you censoring a torture victim's statement to this court.""
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/18/assange-hearing-day-ni...
https://assangecourt.report/september-18-morning
"Mr El-Masri was due to give evidence by video link, but, after a legal argument, presiding judge Vanessa Baraitser decided that it would be sufficient for his statement to be read to the court and he need not appear."
"There had been three days of intense discussion between the counsel and the judge, with the United States government objecting bitterly to Mr El-Masri being heard. A compromise had been reached that he could give evidence provided he did not allege he was tortured by the US Government. However, when he came to give evidence, Mr El-Masri was strangely unable to connect by videolink, even though the defence team had been able to speak to him by video a few hours earlier. Technical staff in the court having been unable to resolve the (ahem) technical issue, rather than simply postpone his evidence until a videolink had been established – as had happened already with two other witnesses when quality issues arose – Judge Baraitser suddenly decided to raise again the issue of whether el-Masri’s evidence should be heard at all."
Wow.
1) https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...
FTA:
it will likely be excluded as irrelevant because the Espionage Act does not allow a public interest defense.
Assange is accused of 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24520757
Once there, see the posts by bashinator and _kbh_ for other sources.
Back to the topic here, the "technical glitches" were present throughout the process, as reported day after day on:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
E.g.
"This hearing has frequently been interrupted by the strange incompetence of the Ministry of Justice in establishing simple videolinks."
"It was not Professor Feldstein’s fault the day finished in confused anti-climax. The court was unable to make the video technology work. For ten broken minutes out of about forty Feldstein was briefly able to give evidence, and even this was completely unsatisfactory as he and Mark Summers were repeatedly speaking over each other on the link."
Also playing with the times:
"Daniel Ellsberg was to give evidence this afternoon. Edward Fitzgerald QC applied for his videolink evidence to be heard at 3.15pm [(in England)] which is 07.15am in California where Dan lives. Baraitser insisted it could not be put back beyond 2.30 pm, thus forcing an 89 year old man [Daniel Ellsberg] to give evidence at 6.30am [(his local time)]. Simply stunning."
The use of internet was also intentionally restricted:
The judge "explained this by stating that the public could normally observe from within the courtroom, where she could control their behaviour. But if they had remote access, she could not control their behaviour and this was not in the “interests of justice”."
An example is if somebody quotes from a document on the phone during a trial, but the document hasn't been submitted or cannot be found. What do you do next? Ask for a continuation for that one document? How about the second one? What if the reading is incorrect?
So to even attempt a bad video link is an injustice.
But we are better off setting them aside and sticking with the mundane issues of electing sensible representatives, supporting investigative journalism, engaging in fact-based discourse.
We have to look at the merits of each theory and decide whether it's batshit or not. Global conspiracy to fake a pandemic? Doesn't seem possible. A couple dudes in the CIA harassing a dude they tortured and then threatened to mess with if he talked? Not impossible.
The criminal acts the US government has been up to raise serious questions regarding what you suggest we do:
> electing sensible representatives
how can you do this when your own government harasses and intimidates people it doesn't like?
> supporting investigative journalism
how can there be investigative journalism if receiving information could turn out to be a felony if it's the wrong information?
> engaging in fact-based discourse
how can you do this when your own government is hiding relevant facts from you?
A conspiracy theory is just one possible explanation of events. There is nothing wrong with attempting validate it while also considering other possible explanations. The harm comes when a shadowy cabal is one’s answer to everything.
> But we are better off setting them aside...
How might a person know such a thing without doing something like running a parallel universe and trying the two approaches?
kidnap... and assassinate.
Is not the US people in any case, is their government. And some of those people seem to have severe and worrying sadistic undercurrents in their personality. As human beings, torturers are a real failure.
This a million times. I'm speaking broadly as I'm not from the US, however this applies pretty much to every country: "People are not their government" should be always considered when criticizing any nation or being criticized by others because of government politics. Identifying people with their government choices is the 1st step towards building hatred that will be used to convince weak minded citizen to enroll and invade that country. Most wars happened because governments screwed their own people convincing them there were enemies ready to kill them, where in fact there was nobody.
Disagreed completely.
In a democracy, people are responsible for their governments. That's the whole idea of democracy. If you can pick your leadership you are responsible for who you pick and every single action they take. You get the credit for the good, and you get the blame for the bad. With great power comes great responsibility and whatnot.
In an autocracy where people cannot choose their leadership, it's more murky.
[edit] It's so weird to see this American blame shirking from the ground floor all the way to the president. "Well, I'm not responsible for the government just because I pick them," to staying home on Election Day and responding "well he's not my president," to POTUS' perennial "well, Obama and Hillary are really at fault."
Is nobody taking responsibility for anything anymore?
But what if we have a representative democracy instead? Then people's choice is limited to picking one of the options provided by dominant political parties; and the parties are responsible for providing those options.
Just imagine the idea of "representative X" applied to things other than democracy, to see what difference it makes. For example, "representative freedom" = you can't have it, but you can choose one of two people, and they will. Or "representative sex" = you are free to choose people who can actually have sex; feels great, doesn't it? Or "representative free speech" = you are not allowed to speak your mind, but here is a list of a few pre-approved people, choose one of them, and they will speak their mind freely. Isn't it amazing how different things get when they become "representative"?
If I'm presented with two candidates, neither of whom I agree with, what am I to do? If I can't trust a word of any politician, how can I make an informed decision?
What do you mean by responsibility? I assume you don't mean every American civilian should be prosecuted for the crimes of their government? If you don't mean this, please clarify what you mean.
Which country are you from? Are you responsible for all of their actions?
Last time I checked I don’t get to vote for policies directly. Last time I checked I didn’t get to vote for every representative position and in some cases people won those elections but didn’t even get a plurality of the votes.
Why exactly am I responsible for something I cannot control?
Politicians, bar some exceptions, always represent the worst of given population. Sociopaths, power hungry, fucked up inside, very good presentation / talking. Always thinking how to use given situation and people around them to their advantage, and there can never be too many advantages.
The fact that people keep voting the same 1 / 2 parties over and over is a proof for that - nobody disagrees with them enough, en masse, to vote otherwise (or not vote).
The real shocker here is not that people do cruel things. Murderers carrying out abhorrent fantasies exist and existed everywhere, anytime.
Suppose I have such a personality, and that becomes known, my government then should do the appropriate medical and judical procedures.
When the government then goes "oh, here is 10k/month and a ticket to Macedonia and go live your dream", there is something truly, truly fucked up and it is not the individual in question.
And that grievance is a systemic one and therefor a responsibilty of the people should they have the intention to declare themselves as a democracy...
I believe the major issue that everyone affected likes to avoid is their profit of that behavior. Not necessarily torture itself, I don't think it helps for interrogations but may serve as a deterrent, but global power and regular war and demonstrations of strength. That gets you a lot of favorable trade deals, you get to be the world's reserve currency, and you can borrow without any limits. That's pretty good, and probably more than makes up for the insane military spending - and citizens profit from that as well.
I don't think there's a lot of motivation to be overly critical in that regard, much like most people won't be too critical of their company when they get half a million in total compensation.
Prescott Bush made the cia for gods sake lol. These people have dominated for 4000 years until Christians fought back, who were gentiles who knew the teaching because of jesus, the king of the Jews, who sent 12 opposites out to teach the gentiles.
The isralites(Jews) killed their own king and denounce him to this day! Even Muslims, a religion that came along way after this fact 2000 years ago accepts the lamb of god, jesus.
Not Jews! They the only ones calling themselves gods chosen, no one else!
They lack empathy, its Real simple really! That's how they do what they do. Hard for most gentiles to understand, you know, been empathetic and all
It seems we are in the quandary of the masses. Until Americans start feeling the repercussions of their states war crimes and crimes against humanity, they will simply allow them to continue to occur. Making further terrorism pretty much inevitable, on one side, and further leaks from real patriots, on the other side.
Anyway .. Assange is the tip of the ice berg.
For as long as Americans continue to ignore the burning piles of rubble that are the product of their state, the leaks will continue.
> [Those] who uncover state crimes are the enemy of the state.
This is an interesting point, considering Snowdon made public improper behaviour, which resulted in him fleeing the country, while (at least some of) the improper behaviour has been declared illegal behaviour by a court of law. Meanwhile Snowdon remains persona non grata.
(I know they are not “Obama’s” crimes but that’s the only way to get trump engaged, or maybe just “democrats” crimes)
I think he would run with it if only it didn’t set president for whistleblowers to blow the whistle on whatever he has done...I dont think he thinks deeply enough to consider secondary effects but those around him may
Apparently, no, as Trump has much higher priority of "controlling" the press. See "Trump’s campaign against the press" from the testimony of Mark Feldstein, who's a Professor of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Maryland and a witness for defense in this process:
https://assangecourt.report/witness-statement-feldstein
"Seen in this light, the administration’s prosecution of Julian Assange is part and parcel of its campaign against the news media as a whole. Indeed, Assange’s criminal indictment under the US Espionage Act is arguably its most important action yet against the press, with potentially the most far-reaching consequences."
Being distracted by the scary orange puppet rhetoric is one thing - having the courage to face the criminal charges with integrity, at a state and cultural level, is another thing entirely.
The only reason the USA isn't having its leaders schackled in the docks of The Hague for the last 20 years of criminal murderous insanity, is the people of the USA don't think it necessary, or warranted.
That is the purpose of the leaks: to encourage an honest investigation by a just and fair society. Alas, the conditions for that cannot exist under secrecy regimes dictated by a military junta.
Its not rhetoric if you've had to dig your children out from under the rubble.
I'm not surprised this is a scary subject, and that it is immensely important to the American public that it be kept hidden away beyond the state secrecy walls of privilege.
The collateral damage video wasn't rhetoric, either. Again, innocent children being murdered for lies.
Let us not forget Assange's message: yes, the USA is committing atrocious crimes against humanity, on the regular, and expecting to be allowed to get away with it.
I’m neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you.
I was simply trying to highlight a statement of fact from your post, and provide an example of this occurring.
It is extremely important that discourse not be repressed for the sake of political expediency ...
If there were more awareness of the horrors, Assange wouldn't have been so necessary. If we want to reign in the war-mongers, we must hold them accountable.
Always.
People aren't unemotional robots, and thus don't always conform to prejudices on what constitutes the 'correct' tone.
It's more useful to criticize the substance of a persons words, not how they choose to express them.
Genocide is happening, for fucks sake. CIA has 2000 secret torture/rendition sites. Is that really something you want people to be using 'inclusive language' to describe?
Perhaps you should have a session with the "empathy police".
Iraq lost 5% of its population because of these heinous criminal liars that still run America today. Thank goodness for Assange, letting the free world know!
America is bombing the fuck out of the world, and expects to be getting away with it - and the message in lobotomising Assange, is to let you and me know that we better not be trying to discuss this fact.
FUCK THAT. Get mad about what is being done to Julian Assange - because we are next.
> but yeah, drop the ol' "Ma' Russians!" into the conversations, and heads explode.
This isn't an attempt to vividly illustrate the problem or an expression of righteous anger. It's just trolling - it accomplishes nothing but inciting people to yell back at you.
No one in this thread cares to "be taken seriously" by those who don't acknowledge recent history.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Not, it is not.
In any case, having 201.000 Americans killed in less than a year (after being goose-feeded with fake news to ignore the danger), does not feel like an improvement over the classical stuff. (Without forgetting the rest of covid's victims, of course).
If you want more explanation about how we moderate this, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Insofar as you continue to allow political topics to remain on the site, which is not content that I submit, people are going to comment on it. When people post bullshit in these political threads, it motivates a response. I’m rarely, if ever, a top level comment.
The uptick in recent comments is simply due to the increasingly politically charged environment and the influx of submissions that are overtly political, or other users propensity to take conversations off topic by interjecting some ideological or partisan nonsense. Like jessaustin here race-baiting every thread and actually advocating domestic terrorism, for example.
You literally replied to a comment I made saying that genocide is not happening. It is, in fact, not happening.
You’ll notice that my comments of this nature are attempts to nip things in the bud and usually call for measured, civilized discourse. HN seems to have an influx of these wannabe communist revolutionaries trying to push their nonsense here. My replies do not advance particular positions, they are an attempt to keep things rational and encourage exposure and debate with opposing viewpoints without the character assassination and demonization that many can’t resist resorting to. Most of the time I’m defending viewpoints that I don’t even agree with.
Maybe you should just get serious about banning political stories. There are other sites for that.
Banning political stories isn't an option. This is explained at the second link I mentioned: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
You'd better look this up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You've got to find a way to hold a conversation about America's war crimes, and its very real crimes against humanity, without violent repression of speech - which is what your threats of account removal amount to.
This story is extremely relevant to your readership.
The title of this HN story is "Survivor of CIA Torture and Rendition Supports Assange at Extradition Trial", and here you are, dang, threatening to ban me for discussing America's war crimes, the very ones which were revealed to the world by Julian Assange.
You are LITERALLY using the very same playbook as Judge Baraitser: "America's crimes against humanity, its war crimes, and its criminal behaviour: SHALL NOT BE DISCUSSED OPENLY IN PUBLIC because: its too scary to the readership".
Yes, America's war crimes are scary. But no matter what you do, they're not going away. You must be prepared to discuss this and to maintain community while it is discussed, openly and honestly, in your forum. The HN community are extremely relevant to this discussion.
Dissuading open discussion about America's horrendous war crimes and diverting attention away from them is complicity.
I'm sure there is a story to be told about how HN censors stories critical of its military industrial masters. In fact, we can follow the money and come up with a very interesting question:
* What is Y-combinators/HN's connection with the KSA and how does that effect HN's reporting around the current genocide of Yemen? *
Perhaps we will read about it in future Wikileaks, or whatever cool tech news site that comes along to replace the smouldering pile of rubble that HN is inevitably to become, as a result of its administrators cowardice...
In the meantime, since you have made comments designed to intimidate me based on personally identifiable information I have posted on your web site:
I am hereby requesting immediate erasure of personal data concerning me according to Article 17 GDPR.
Please erase all personal data concerning me as defined by Article 4(1) GDPR.
Please delete the following personal data concerning me: all comments posted to the HN site under the 'fit2rule' account name.
I am of the opinion that the requirements set forth in Article 17(1) GDPR are fulfilled. You cannot claim an expection based on Article 17(3) GDPR either, particularly as I am not a public figure.
If I have given consent to the processing of my personal data (e.g. according to Article 6(1) or Article 9(2) GDPR), I am hereby withdrawing said consent for the entire process.
In addition, I am objecting to the processing of personal data concerning me (which includes profiling), according to Article 21 GDPR. I request that you restrict the processing of the data concerning me pending the verification whether your legitimate grounds override mine, pursuant to Art. 18(1)(d) GDPR.
If you have made the aforementioned data public, you are obliged pursuant to Article 17(2) GDPR to take all reasonable steps to inform other controllers, including search engine operators, who process the personal data listed above, that I have requested the erasure of all links, copies or replications. This applies not only to exact copies of the data concerned, but also to those from which information contained in the data concerned can be derived.
In case you have disclosed the affected personal data to third parties, you have to communicate my request for erasure of the affected personal data, as well as any references to it, to each recipient as laid down in Article 19 GDPR. Please also inform me about those recipients.
If you object to the requested erasure, you have to justify that to me.
My request explicitly includes any other services and companies for which you are the controller as defined by Article 4(7) GDPR.
As laid down in Article 12(3) GDPR, you have to confirm the erasure to me without undue delay and in any event within one month of receipt...
It's no surprise they have a bias towards excusing crimes against humanity.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24526092.
Remind me again, what made the USA any better than North Korea or any other off-the-rails criminal regime?
If this statement about the Espionage Act is correct, then why is there even a discussion whether Assange will get a fair trial in the USA? It's plain as daylight that he never will, even for that specific fact only.
In fact, any country that signed and ratified the UN's UDHR, should be barred from extraditing anyone to the USA. Especially for cases like these.
If this involved an African, Asian or a Middle Eastern country, the USA and EU would no doubt threaten with bombing the country into submission, if they would continue to violate basic human right in order to cover up their criminal actions.
A lot of people ask also why Snowden keeps "hiding" in Russia and doesn't come back to face the music.
It's because he's not even allowed to use the public good defense per the Espionage Act.
As for Assange, the poor man has already suffered enough, what the UN amounts to torture. This is despicable and anyone who is concerned about the Uyghurs, Rohingya etc. should voice a strong opposition to what is happening to Assange in the West.
P.S. His prosecution isn't even about the 2016 election, however you feel about that, it's about him exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. government, killing civilians, including knowingly journalists and laughing about it.
Since 2013, I have come to view Assange and Snowden and future leakers and whistleblowers as necessary steps of the journey, but not the destination.
the destination is to create some contrived legal case that perfectly triggers multiple legal conditions which unlocks the door to be able to directly and openly challenge the espionage act in court. the US Intelligence Community have always gone to extraordinary contortions to prevent the Espionage Act itself from being invoked against the Press which could make it possible to challenge it. Even in Elsberg's case, his charges were dropped before SCOTUS could decide whether the Espionage Act applied to the Press and the Public Interest.
i think one reason why DOJ has been so rabid and vicious against Assange is because he is not a US Citizen, so they don't have to give him as much Freedom of Speech as they would an American.
i dont feel optimistic about Assange's case. if it was going to turn out good, that would have happened years ago.
i can only hope the spiritual successor to Wikileaks is led by an American who is wickedly clever enough to leak the right kind of top secrets that are scandalously in the Public Interest and thereby force a head on collision between SCOTUS, the Espionage Act and the First Amendment.
... is an intellectually offensive question.
Posed in the open, by someone on an 'American' blog, in perfect safety knowing there would not remotely ever be any repercussions for posing the question.
perhaps when i try to apply to a FedGov job, some automated sytem for scoring Inside Threats uses that Watchlist, and determines i am a security threat, and i am denied the job.
perhaps that automated scoring system is sold to the private sector, and then i am also denied jobs and bank loans and housing and travel when the system rejects me for unspecified reasons, since the existence of the secret Watchlist will never be known outside of FedGov.
through the existence of numerous forms of mass surveillance exposed by Wikileaks, we know the machinery of an automated social credit system has already been built. it's operational. the only question is how far along are they in putting it to use to truly turn us into a superficially happier nation sized prison camp like North Korea.
It's really sad how deep down the rabbit hole of delusional moral equivalence so much of the anti American bigotry on HN amounts to, and of course so ironic that this is all American-based.
If you want to work for US government spy apparatus, yes, there will be a loyalty test. And that is fine and normal, and it's the same everywhere.
Otherwise, you are free to say pretty much as you please, whenever you want, unless you're making bombs or calling for violence - even in the later case you can get away with it.
Thankfully, there are forces in the world that remain vigilant towards ensuring that you can do that. You can look on a map and it's fairly evident to see which places are fairly open and safe, and which are not.
The way this kind of thing is done is by managing that the case goes to the "proper" judge.
Assange is going to be extradited to the US and there's nothing anyone can do about it, short of breaking him out of his imprisonment.
Is anyone strategizing around this? Do they accept donations?
> Macedonia’s “government was consequently responsible for those acts performed by foreign officials…Those measures had been used with premeditation, the aim being to cause Mr. Masri severe pain and suffering in order to obtain information,” the ECHR additionally found.
> (...)
> “The U.S. diplomatic cables revealed the extent of pressure brought upon the German authorities (and in parallel, relevant Spanish authorities) not to act upon the clear evidence of criminal acts by the USA even though by then exposed,” Goetz added.
Then some Americans are confused that many in the western world don't like American influence. I find it outrageous that these things happen, and I wouldn't want my government to consider such a country an ally.
And a lot are totally clueless and just have no idea of what's going on.
There's a lot of propaganda, poor education and lack of information in the US. Just watch a presidential debate, it's a joke.
Nazi germany wasnt the first country to act like that. They didnt invent torture or mass killings, genocide, etc. It had happened before, everyone knew it, everyone knew that it can happen.
And yet they voted blindly and thought "ah, well, it wont happen here". And low and behold, a few years later it does.
I cannot feel sorry for people who vote out of habit and are then surprised that the government they voted for doesn't do what they silently hoped for.
It's very dangerously close already, it's only a matter of time until those in power finally take the thin mask off.
Won't the citizens be surprised! Fox news never warned us of this!
Every american is given a voice, to vote for the best party, the best candidate, based on what they know and believe. Voting is anonymous. You dont have to tell anyone what you voted for. Vote for a third party, or for whatever you think is best.
But don't ever vote out of habit.
The reality is Democrats and Republicans are about 6 inches apart on every single major issue. Compare the platforms of the "left" and "right" here to other major democracies worldwide, and you'll see.
Things are a little different with the current administration, but even that, the concrete policy and substance issues aren't all that far apart.
- Neither side supports socialized medicine.
- Neither side supports free or cheap college or doing anything about student debt.
- Neither side supports decriminalization or legalization of narcotics.
- Neither side is interested in reducing defense spending.
- Neither side is interested in immigration reform (as evidenced by the Obama administration having, for a long time, controlled both houses and the presidency and changing literally nothing).
- Neither side is interested in reforming the intelligence services or closing GITMO -- remember that?
- Neither side is interested in prison reform or policing reform. Police in America kill 10X as many people per capita as Canadian police kill. The only leader to actually implement any form of prison reform in decades was Donald Trump, credit where due. And that's likely only because he's not really a Democrat or a Republican.
- Both sides persecuted and prosecuted Asange and Snowden.
Really, what are the major points of policy differentiation? A 2% tax hike on the wealthy?
In an autocracy, it's murkier.
You were definitely right to call me out on that.
It reminds me of the 'literacy tests' given to black voters, back in the Jim Crow era. We're doing this to help them participate in our democracy, the racists would say. But the reality was in fact the complete opposite.
The structure of the political system itself matters too - for example, this concentration of so much power into a single person, that the US and other countries have with the presidential model, gives them some very autocratic attributes as well.
I do think your claim about citizens in a democracy ultimately being responsible for the actions of their government is a bit much though, or at least not very useful. individual voters may have opposed the victor in the election, or they may have grudgingly voted them in to avoid an even worse candidate.
If we ever fix our government to add more democracy or operate more on the opinions of the citizens then I might feel connected to what my government does but as it stands now there's very little connection between me and others around me and the government that takes actions on the world stage.
I'm not arguing the city would be better off with more republicans in office, but it's a good example to show how even affluent people can be totally disenfranchised in a political system. no matter how effectively these people mobilize, they will never win an election, even at the most local level, in the foreseeable future.
Has the nice property of being well-nigh incorruptible, cheap to implement, and perfectly representative of the population interested in serving.
I also like the fact that it provides direct agency as a “voter” (volunteer to serve), rather than indirect agency (vote for a volunteer).
America is a Representative Democracy. we vote, but we are powerless to change what our Representatives do on our behalf.
by the way, this is really where the root idea of a "Deep State" existing comes from. We vote for Obama to close Gitmo, then he doesn't do it and we never know why. We never voted for illegal NSA domestic mass surveillance, yet here we are and it's normalized. We never voted for CIA renditions, black sites, torture and political assassinations, yet here we are. We never voted for the Federal Reserve to give trillions of dollars to the richest megabillionaires to park that wealth in real estate and price ordinary people out of affordable housing, yet here we are.
it's no longer a crazy conspiracy theory to look at the catastrophic effects of FedGov and how nothing ever improves and conclude the reason is because the govt we think we have is not really in control, but rather a secret State-Within-a-State is in control. a Shadow Govt, a permanent class of faceless bureaucrats wearing dark suits who operate the machinery of Govt and who flaunt the efforts of our elected Representatives and who ignore the will of the voters.
if there ever was an entity that called for extravagent levels of hyperviolence unseen in history to overthrow it, the Deep State is that entity.
GITMO never closed because the US didn't find countries super willing to take in the detainees, and felt it would be "too distasteful" to let them stay in the US proper. Not a good case for violating human rights law, IMO, but to quote POTUS "it is what it is."
1993, 1994, 1995, Clinton was President and the House and Senate were both Democratic. Clinton's big immigration reform bill was the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. It's purpose was to "[strengthen] the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system — without punishing those living in the United States legally."
Clinton created the mass-deportation machine in use today. Clinton's bill made it harder to immigrate to the US. Clinton created the 3-year and 10-year re-entry bars that continue to separate loved ones to this day. If an unlawful resident marries a US citizen, they're entitled to a green card but they can't apply for it from within the US but as the minute they leave they get a 10-year re-entry bar.
The last guy to grant amnesty to the undocumented was Reagan in 1986, and he was, last I checked, a Republican.
At some point you've gotta stop blaming the other guy.
Democrats are not the party of immigration, legal or illegal.
Obama was not as much of a centrist but he was obstructed heavily by the opposition.
I'll continue to blame the people who vote 90% in one direction over the ones who vote 90% the other lol.
Edit: you added some specific comments about immigration. This is correct, Democrats are not very pro-immigration. They are more pro-immigration than the GOP, e.g. DACA order vs. DACA repeal, but the two parties are pretty close on immigration. There is a much bigger gap on issues like healthcare.
"Instead of starting from scratch and getting rid of private insurance, he has a plan to build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate." This is a quote from the Biden campaign site.
As though letting anyone enroll in Medicare is "starting from scratch."
Compared to the Trump plan on healthcare which roughly amounts to: "Leave the Affordable Care Act in place because there really is no other option that anyone can come up with."
So, the Democratic plan is to leave private insurers be, so long as they cover pre-existing conditions. Which is the Republican plan. The difference is one is framed positively and the other negatively? Bumping up vs ignoring Medicare and Medicaid financing? Maybe? Even that's not clear from the Biden site.
The issue is the system is broken entirely, and both sides plan to move the deck chairs around -- one six inches to the left, and one six inches to the right. This was equally true of DACA. Leaving people in a perpetual state of deferred action parole via executive order is not a solution to anything.
A good half the county would strongly disagree with what you feel - and that they’ve blocked those from passing isn’t proof that the system is failing, it’s proof it’s working. Obama got his healthcare plan. Every president usually gets maybe one or two bigger things they want, not all. It’s a sign that it’s working. Remember, you’re in a democracy, and about half of the people don’t agree with DACA, increased immigration, single payer...
There are clear and obvious differences in how the party operates and which side is on team Science for instance, but the core policy issues just aren’t all that different.
Now you could say neocons and neolibs did dominate for a while, and yea that has some truth. But it’s not so true today.
The two party system is really interesting because within each party you really do have diversity, and then they all compromise with each other. The dems are doing that this year. They have to do that, or else they lose their electorate. The parties move around constantly. Ron Paul moved the needle. Al Gore brought forward environmentalism. The Liberals have changed wildly over the last 30 years from being more middle/low class focused to being the party of the rich, of tech, and shifting towards focusing on minorities. That they were more aligned for a bit doesn’t prove anything.
Look at how Trump is remaking the right. It’s been fascinating and he’s done a sort of garbage cleaning on their platform.
Look at how Bernie’s success has radically pushed the left.
"Extreme socialist" would be arguing that the state should own the means of production. Until AOC starts arguing for nationalizing Google as a means of making core internet infrastructure public, for instance, I wouldn't worry about the "extreme socialists."
Ok, four major leftward shifts the party is embracing, could easily name more. Can you name some things we’ve moved right on?
Tell me Bernie didn’t win a significant portion of the vote and all the early primaries twice now? Joe Biden doesn’t support universal healthcare and very high taxes including a huge raise on capital gains, he doesn’t have a running mate who calls for reparations? He hasn’t totally changed on policing? Elizabeth Warren is suddenly a minor player in the party when her and Bernie combined had a significant chunk of the debate time and raise as much money as anyone? When it’s convenient for your argument you suddenly claim they are minor, when they aren’t.
And yes all those positions are a big move left for American politics.
And I’m just sticking with the economic issues, socially we’ve moved much further left.
The general position that we’ve moved right is laughable, I’m still waiting on examples.
Also, the two parties have conspired to put in all kinds of barriers, at the state and local level, to make it difficult to unseat their primacy.
But to say they just aren't all that different, ignoring the effect of consistency over time, is like suggesting the pressure differential above and below an airfoil isn't that different. It is true, but it's not a complete answer either.
I guess it would probably be something similar to Noam Chomsky, who is voting Democrat this year because the policy differences are so stark.
https://the.ink/p/noam-chomsky-wants-you-to-vote-for
start here on page 19 of Chomsky's book he wrote in 1979.
https://libcom.org/history/chomsky-pol-pots-genocidal-regime...
Chomsky was dead wrong about his heirarchy of languages and he set back computing by 50 years. He has also been wrong about geopolitics, since he ends up supporting the very Western Imperialism that he rails against.
No opinion on Chomsky's politics. But that quote definitely needs some substantiation.
Personally, I don't see how anyone, has managed to set back computing by 50 years.
But the three grammar classes were correct, and are still in use. They were later found to match work done 2500 years ago, in India.
Being wrong in science, particularly biology, is not a crime, nor, usually, even a shame.
These kinds of stats are so dishonest. Police in America are subject to 10x more violence per capita as Canadians.
Citation needed.
Especially as studies show that increasing militarization of the police force leads to more civilian deaths [1], and the trend towards militarization has been stark and pronounced in the US. [2] The issue is really that the US uses police as customer service for life and as front-line mental health treatment due to lack of proper socialized medicine. They are also trained to shoot first and ask questions later -- to treat everyone as a potential threat to their lives.
However, let's take what you say as fact. This points to a deep failure in society that needs to be addressed. People are products of their society, and if society is more violent in America then some serious introspection needs to be done. Looking at 10X per capita and shrugging it off as "well that's just America for you" is the problem.
[1] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2018/07/05/evidence-sugges...
[2] https://fee.org/articles/the-militarization-of-americas-poli...
It took a civil war for the end of slavery to begin in the US.
It took decades of terrorism for the Irish to stop being as subjugated by the British in Northern Ireland.
And so on.
History indicates that what you really need in the US right now is some violent, direct action against those committing human rights atrocities. Voting isn't going to do shit.
This of course relies on population to be at least slightly smart and not dumb herd of easy to manipulate sheeps, but that's a basic premise of democracy in general.
As for WWII, try to come up with something deeper than parroting this, ie how Swiss took tons of refugees that would face deportation and death, while being surrounded by Axis from all directions. How they decided to stop at one point because they didn't have enough food to feed their population, but Geneva canton kept taking refugees in regardless. They helped Allies' secret services with undermining axis in numerous ways, ie keeping the post in Campione d'Italia to subvert Duce's regime.
Its way more than many other 'neutral' countries done during WWII. And mistakes they made, they owned them, admitted them and paid compensations. What more do you want?
Direct democracy can work in small countries. Will it work in a country with 150M or 300M people? Will it work? Maybe, one has to schedule voting every 6 months, just like a train schedule.
I don’t see us anywhere near a failed experiment and until anyone can make that case strongly, changing our fundamental structure is off the table. 3rd highest GDP per capita, most innovative country by far, extremely high tourism rate, most diverse country in multiple ways, consistently expanding healthcare / best cancer treatment the world / most innovative drug research, hugely successful progressive social movements, most philanthropic, cities that give the highest amounts of social welfare in per capita terms, you can go on.
Of course you can point out many bad things, but that doesn’t invalidate that it’s not failing, just that it’s not perfect - and to be honest, much of the failures to me look like local ones, not Federal ones. Take Chicago for example.
We need diversity of governance so we can find out what rule of law works best in the long run. Let Europe experiment with more direct democracy. Look at Singapore, Rwanda for the other side. Let the experiments run so long as they don’t trample on basic human rights. America is flawed, but for the same reason Google Chrome shouldn’t win out the browser wars, Representative Democracy should stay, it matches up well on the stats I care about, and it tends not to trample on freedoms nearly as much (something something three lions and a zebra).
I do agree that K street holds too much power, not politicians. And politicians aren’t totally corrupt, just about half or so.
Rather than by those committing the human rights atrocities?
Commenting occasionally on a political topic as part of a diverse pattern is one thing, but only using HN for that is another. There are many past explanations of this at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
If you or anyone wants to read about how we approach moderation of politics in general, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... has lots.
(You've also repeatedly been posting flamebait comments and breaking HN's rules in other ways too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to them?)
All these issues have to be put in context: the scale, the type of abuses, the proportionality, the context, the risk etc..
9/11 was a 'very scary' moment in history, the likelihood that others were planning to do the same was very high, and legit terrorist organizations were operating around the world.
The response to 'non-uniformed irregular attack' was necessarily going to have to be equally as asymmetric, i.e. getting at bad people in the locations they were working form, as opposed to a battle field.
It gets a little bit pedantic to discuss 'human rights' when in conflict, people are exterminated 'in accordance with all UN/International laws and rules' sometimes pretty arbitrarily. For example, the teenager Omar Khadr who killed a US Medic on the battlefield was injured, and about to die. It was US special forces who them saved him, ironically so he could spend a long time in Guantanamo.
The paradox of the fact that were he not of 'special interest' - he would be 100% dead, and nobody, not 'Amnesty International' or the UN would put up a fuss, as he was shot lobbing grenades at medics.
US and EU laws are not designed for acute, wartime scenarios, the only real question is how rational and reasonable the management of force can be applied without breaking too many humane boundaries, and, how many 'mistakes' we are willing to make.
The CIA black cells are definitely a stain, but in the grand scheme of history, it's nothing. Civil, lawful and humane order was otherwise broadly maintained.
Or you could also go to Vietnam and Laos, and notice the kid that gets blown up by a US mine every few days, or go notice the damage of Agent Orange, or go to the mass graves where millions lie buried.
How is that for scale?
You might want to ask the mass murdering regimes of those regions, many of whom continue to operate today, about those issues.
Do remember to wash the all the blood of those stars and stripes once you've finished waving them about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That anyone would assume that only highlights their own myopia and relevant triggers.
If you believe in proportionality and not utilitarianism, I shudder to think what you find commensurate. Certainly much more than I would.
How many people did Vietnam murder since the end of the war? How many did Laos?
Before American intervention, the Vietnamese Communists had already murdered up to a million of their own citizens in various purges and 'land reforms', including deaths in forced labour camps.
During the war, there were mass arbitrary detainments, forced labour and killings by the Communists both of their own citizens, and execution of S. Vietnamese families and officials by subterfuge. The North Allied Viet Cong routinely executed civilians for political purposes.
After the war, the North Vietnamese Communists dragged 10's of thousands of S. Vietnamese out into the streets and executed them in cold blood.
They then put 100's of thousands into forced labour camps.
By at least one historians estimation (see below), about 250 000 people died due to impoverished conditions.
That very often people don't know these things says a lot about the lazy, 'comic book' intellectualism regarding such past events that basically makes it impossible to take anything more seriously than a random reddit-thread argument. And even worse, that anyone would even dare compare mass murder on this scale to terrible events like 'Mai Lai' (which actually were isolated however terrible) or even US government action more broadly is completely ridiculous.
Here is the range of democide in Vietnam during this era [1]
and the tabulations [2]
And Vietnam in 2020, Human Rights Watch [3] [1] https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM
[2] https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF
[3] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/vietn...
Fighting oponents in an offensive war is 100%, no question, muder.
Equivocating people that died in one of the poorest countries in the world after a war where more explosives were dropped than during WW2 is ridiculous.
Finally, 2/3 of your sources literally come from a party in the war and are thus completely unreliable. Find a source that is not aligned with and does not receive money from either Vietnam or the US. If you can't, then the conclusions drawn from that have to written off.
Finally, if you are going to be using biased sources and equivocating definitions so that you can have a shadow of an argument based on misguided semantics, please refrain from insulting your interlocutor.
When a hundred million people will be on the street, and fire is opened on protesters, then is the time. Starting violence as a popular movement for human rights is not a good option.
I think against wide spread surveillance, small arms cannot do much.
But yes, I meant it as a figure of speech more than anything.
Till you depend on America for protection you will have to play by their rules.
What I believe Americans are confused about European reluctance to protect themselves.
We recently saw Chinese threatening politician from Checz republic. Other European nations still welcomed the group.
You have to admit there's two sides to that, though. The fact that the EU doesn't _have_ to defend itself reduces the incentive to do so. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we were to learn that the USA (pre-Trump) lobbies EU countries to keep their defense budget low, as that maintains dependence of EU on the USA.
But I 100% agree with you. Pull USA influence out of Europe - that's the best way to force Europe to take its self-defense seriously.
Today’s left are more right than yesterday’s right.
That said, at the local and house level there is an increase in left candidates getting elected. We'll see where that goes.
On what grounds? AOC, like Sanders, advocates for centrist policies like those in the UK. AOC is a left leaning centrist. The rhetoric in the US does label her and Sanders extreme left but that’s evidence in favour of my point - there is no left in the USA.
Who is the USA’s version of John McDonnell telling us all that there’s a lot to learn from Das Kapital?
I disagree. I think we had torture so that a President could look tough on National Security as a re-election strategy. Not-torturing people and "identity politics" are not mutually exclusive, there is no reason that we couldn't have both. "Identity politics" is fundamentally about human liberty and the dignity of the individual, a.k.a. individualism, which is also the same moral foundation that most arguments against torture rest on. Advancing the rights of the individual advances the case against torture.
You can not consider the way in which the “left” regards Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and seriously think that this crowd considers human rights to be even of passing importance.
In reality, I can both oppose female genital mutilation and consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali racist.
Of course you can. But became sufficiently famous doing so, and you will probably also find yourself on some list of "problematic" people.
In case I am completely wrong about this, the best way to convince me would be to provide a name of a recent famous speaker against female genital mutilation who is considered politically correct.
This acts like people were out to vilify her, when she publicly holds incredibly offensive positions.
OK, I'll bite.
Former congressman Joe Crowley
Layli Miller-Muro
Nimco Ali
Comfort Momoh
Waris Dirie
I am vehemently opposed to female genital mutilation. Even with HN's overly large number of contrarians and trolls, I claim no one can write a convincing argument that my previous sentence is in any way racist.
Makes sense that you put this in quote marks, given that you're just inventing wild caricatures to argue against.
Is it no wonder that the police in USA murder black people, when the state also does so?
If you say they put X above Y, I feel like you should quantify that with something.
GP is rightfully pointing out that political discourse is far often centered on identity politics to the exclusion of more important topics such as human rights.
No one is saying that one precludes the other except you.
1. Until June 16, 2020, that you could be fired for being gay or transgender. And that's not even a blanket ruling, as religious institutions in the US are basically exempt from the Civil Rights Act protections.
2. It's still illegal to use one bathroom or another as a transgender person depending on which state you're in.
3. Transgender people are not allowed in the US military.
The list goes on, that's just kinda off the top of my head.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_European_Un...
Additionally, some of the hormone blocking drugs can cause bone loss (presenting a real physical risk).
Obviously, this has innumerable risks in a military environment from an objective standpoint. In fact, even post-transition, suicidal ideation is still orders of magnitude higher than average.
You pass basic training just the same so half your arguments are null right there. If you can’t pass basic training they don’t care what’s between your legs, you’re going home.
Do you think basic training is enough to identify the risks associated with the bone density loss seen in some clinical transgender treatments? My understanding is that problems associated with that side effect could manifest at any time.
All the research we have on this says it's caused by the presence of transphobia, and isn't intrinsic to being trans.
His actions clearly came with the moral imperative of whistleblowing - even just this one example shows the humanitarian crimes that would go unrevealed if the leaked documents weren’t published.
There’s just no way to pretend like Assange caused harm or violated law - whistleblowing is not stealing, it’s not treason, it’s not endangerment of affected government perpetrators. It’s the exposure of mass scale criminal murder and torture.
The helicopter who shot journalists, that movie was genuine, and a proper leak. All the diplomatic cables being leaked? Clinton's e-mails? I don't believe all of that was in the public interest. He fell in the trap of making it political, us vs them (why he went in bed with the Russians), and disregarding operational safety.
These facts render it moot what you or I might personally think about his political motivations. Not only are such speculations not a basis for any of the charges, but the very evidence itself (the cables) requires us to see the humanitarian imperative that they be leaked and thus to view leakers and publishers as whistleblowers, setting all speculated internal motives we can’t prove (and which don’t supersede the moral imperative here) aside.
In the case of the DNC email leaks, I could see a better argument that it was political, but then it also wouldn’t matter. None of the Espionage Act charges or accusations of putting US agents in grave harm are based on leaked DNC emails, only Iraq War leaks and the diplomatic cables. It would be awfully hard to prove any serious harm from publishing the DNC emails - and also the standard for publishers protected in that case is much higher. Keep in mind all that is proved that he did is publish them (no different than tons of other news outlets).
> In the case of the DNC email leaks, I could see a better argument that it was political, but then it also wouldn’t matter. None of the Espionage Act charges or accusations of putting US agents in grave harm are based on leaked DNC emails, only Iraq War leaks and the diplomatic cables. It would be awfully hard to prove any serious harm from publishing the DNC emails - and also the standard for publishers protected in that case is much higher. Keep in mind all that is proved that he did is publish them (no different than tons of other news outlets).
It pretty much affected the outcome of the election up to the point that we USA got an orangutan in office. It is something Russian troll farms and Cambridge Analytica were also trying to do. All three's actions affect our democratic process in a negative way (ie. we want stability not chaos right before an election). Is it basis to get him prosecuted via Espionage Act? No, but that Act is retarded either way; lets look at other laws instead. How about illegal access to a remote computer? Then we're getting to more fair waters. Another one is putting innocent lives in danger by leaking sensitive data.
The testimony of John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count (which deeply depended on Wikileaks materials to corroborate many illegal civilian deaths in the Iraq war) is particularly clear on this. He had direct knowledge of the processes Assange used, in conjunction with other major news agencies including the New York Times and The Guardian, to redact as much identifiable information as possible, and even revealed significant details about the software they built to do named entity removal and to extract entries from dictionaries and so forth, across tens of thousands of documents.
It is pure myth that Assange lacked careful, discerning effort to redact materials.
As for your response about the DNC emails I think you have it quite backwards. Assange did not destabilize any election or play any role in Trump being elected. The DNC did that by the behavior that the leaked emails revealed.
The DNC members destabilized the election and created uncertainty and outrage that Trump capitalized on. The DNC members and officials did that, not Assange.
Assange reported it.
>why he went in bed with the Russians
This is unsubstantiated propaganda.
Unless there was a lot media or government attention in this case, it'd be quite easy to point the blame at some terrorist group in Afghanistan and walk away.